musings

More thoughts on the MBTI

The other week’s post on the Myers-Briggs, the way various types are strongly represented in various segments of the world, and feelings of difference really struck a chord.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I wrote it, and I wanted to add a few things.

I am fairly close to the middle on the E/I and N/S dimensions, and I am off the charts on F and J.  Once, while taking a test online with my family (something we occasionally do for fun, which tells you that I come by this particular interest honestly), I read a question aloud because I could not understand it.  It was something about how deadlines are relative.  Baffled, I had to share this bizarre question with my family.  There was much laughter and commentary about how I am so J I don’t even understand the questions designed to test for P-ness (another family story: the time my mother caused an eerie hush in a restaurant when she announced, loudly, to a friend that her problems in life were all because of her P-ness.)

I used to be slightly E, and now I am more than slightly I.  The transition is marked.  I don’t quite know what precipitated it, but how and why people’s types change over the course of their lives is an area that really interests me.

There were also some reactions to my observations about personality types and kinds of work that made me want to explain what I think and mean.  I hope I’ve made clear how firmly I resist simplistic categorizations.  In fact I’ve written a lot about my own personal sense that I contain contradictions in every cell of my body.  I’ve also mused on society’s profound – but ultimately unsuccessful – desire to thrust individuals into neat boxes of identity.  This is just one of a million ways we all seek to order and control a fundamentally terrifying and chaotic universe, both within and without us, isn’t it?  I think so.

When I refer to the over-representation of the ENTJ personality type in business, and when people comment about their own suitability (or not) for certain lines of work, I certainly don’t mean to participate in the kind of reductive categorization I so dislike.  I do think certain personalities gravitate towards certain kinds of work.  I also think that most people have varied roles in life, which may access and rely on different aspects of who we are.  We may have different personas at work, at home, at church, socially.  Of course, taken to the extreme, that becomes a sociopathic misrepresentation of who one is.  But I would aver that almost everyone feels like different parts of their personality are emphasized in various parts of their life.

I believe fervently in the Myers-Briggs as a tool to understand strength, and preferences, and orientation towards the world.  I do not mean to suggest that it’s a way of neatly categorizing or uncomfortably constraining individuals who are kaleidoscopically multi-faceted.

I welcome further thoughts or reactions on Myers-Briggs type.  And in particular, have any of you changed type over the course of your life?

Harry Potter

I was perhaps irrationally thrilled when Whit chose to be Harry Potter this year for Halloween.  Grace was a member of the US Olympic soccer team (you can see her gold medal), a choice that I loved also.

But my Harry Potter obsessed self was delighted when Whit decided to be Harry this year, his 2nd grade year, just as Grace was Hermione in 2010 when she was in 2nd grade.  I am thrilled that over the years we have had full Hogwarts representation in our house. Whit’s costume, in case you are confused, is Harry in his Quidditch robes.  This is an essential distinction for my son!

I’ve loved Harry Potter for a long time.  I read the first four books at the end of the summer of 2000, and distinctly remember walking to a bookstore in Boston the morning after our wedding to buy #4 in hardback to bring on the plane to Bali.  I already had #2 and #3 packed.  Matt joked that I was on my honeymoon with Harry, so obsessed was I.  So I read the series first alone, as an adult.  Then I read them again with Grace (we are on #6 right now; she could read them by herself these days but prefers that I read to her, so I do).  And now I am reading them for the third time with Whit (we are on #3).  I am pleased to say – and not surprised – that new facets of wisdom, insight, and humor reveal themselves with each additional read.  I think the first 2 Harry Potter books are the only books I have ever read three separate times.

I am smitten by almost everything about JK Rowling’s magical world.  I think Harry is a brave, honest, human character with tremendous inspirational power.  I think Hermione is a heroine for the ages.  I adore the way JK Rowling asserts that school can be refuge and home, a place we are known and loved, a place where we learn about our own power, interests, and passions.

I think of Hogwarts often.  I’ve written about how my blog is my own pensieve.  Albus Dumbledore is my absolute favorite character in all of fiction (and that, my friends, is saying something).  One of my life’s central themes, that of light and dark, is the animating trope of the whole series.  JK Rowling has much to say about the inevitability of light and dark in every life, about their intertwined nature, and about how one casts the other into relief.

Some of my favorite – of a long, long list – lines from Harry Potter are these:

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.

Of course this is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?

It is our choices, Harry, that show us who we truly are, far more than our abilities.

We’ve all got both light and dark inside us.  What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.

INFJ, ENTJ, otherness, and the world at large

I’ve written before that I am an INFJ.  And I’ve also described the basic discomfort I felt while at business school.  Recently, Penelope Trunk wrote about something that explains the latter in terms of the former with a clarity that was like turning on a light.

I probably ought not have been as surprised as I was by the data Penelope Trunk shares that less than 1% of all women fall into the Myers-Briggs type ENTJ.  Yet that is the dominant personality type at the business school I attended, enormously disproportionately represented in the class.  I know this because we all had to take the test, and the results were shared widely and clearly, and it was said over and over again that ENTJ was “the type” that had long succeeded at the school and, perhaps more germanely, in the business world.

I sort of can’t believe I have never known this single piece of information, which seems to encapsulate so much of the dissonance that many women I know feel in today’s business world.  I am not sharing this to point fingers or to complain.  Not at all.  I think there is much to be said difference and for forging a new path in a well-mapped and crowded terrain.  But this data point does help me understand myself and the world better, much the same way reading Susan Cain’s Quiet did.

It makes me wonder how it is I wound up in an environment where I was (and am) so different.  Why did I seek out a place where I did not fit, where I felt so other?  Maybe, however, circumstances matter less than our internal wiring, because the truth is when I think about it I have almost always felt  somewhat other.  I have almost always felt as though I was watching the world through a thin pane of glass, close to but essentially apart from the action.

And maybe some subconscious part of me knew that aspects of me did fit in this world. l am both an introvert and a connector, and I do genuinely love the significant part of my life that occurs in the business world.  Maybe there isn’t one single place I fit, after all.  I have more than once described the contradictions that exist in every cell of my body.

I think it’s notable, though, that at least one business school the dominant personality type is one that is so minutely represented in women.  This can’t be separate from the passionate response to Anne Marie Slaughter’s piece about having it all.  That response interested me because it was twofold.  Yes, there was the assertion – and I agree with this – that traditional models of professional success are often incompatible with a hands-on approach to parenting small children.  But even more, I observed many, many women, myself included, writing whole-heartedly about how “having it all” meant many, many different things to different people.

I wish I had a clearly defined thesis, or any kind of neat conclusion to this post.  I’ve been thinking over this tangled mess of themes and questions for a long time now, and a clean answer eludes me.  I think there is value in continuing to expand the notion of success in the world.  I also think that recognizing the norms of situations we find ourselves in is powerful, because it helps explain why we may feel dissonant inside them.  I suppose that is the conclusion, after all: there is power in understanding, even if it that knowledge does not offer neat solutions and tidy resolutions.  Life eludes clean categories, I’ve found.  The best we can do is continue to try to understand ourselves and the environment in which we live.

Tell me, what is your Myers-Briggs type?  I am endlessly fascinated by this.

 

Be in love with your life

Be in love with your life.  Every detail of it. – Jack Kerouac

I saw this quote over the summer and knew instantly that I wanted to write about it.  This is so much of what I think about, write about, feel these days.  It’s taken me a very long time to fall in love with my life.  A very long time.  But I have, and I am.

But that life is full of challenges, both big and small.  It is full of disappointments and heartbreak, fury and fighting, mess and ugliness.  Every day contains some of these things.  For some reason – I suspect it’s my settling into this season, the square middle of my life, the beginning of the afternoon – I grow ever more accepting of the tarnish that is an inevitable part of each day’s sterling silver gleam.  These days, I far less often allow these troubles the power to occlude the brightness of the rest of my life.

You can’t have one without the other, after all.  Maybe that’s what midlife is, realizing this.  Every detail is required to paint the picture.  Another thing I believe is that you can dislike small things – about your life, about your relationships, most crucially, about your self –  while acknowledging their essential role in the whole.  I don’t know if that’s exactly what Kerouac meant, but that’s how I choose to read his words (believing as I do that actually loving every single detail in its own right may be challenging!).

And so, yes, I am in love with my life.  With all of it.  I embrace the shadowy valleys that are as integral to the topography of my life as are the peaks and the wide, sun-drenched plains.  After all, we are only here for a brief, shimmering second; the least we can do is throw our arms around – and ourselves into – the whole of our lives, as they are, right here, right now.  As my friend Stacy Morrison so gorgeously put it, recently, “I see now how much I want to live my life in a way that honors it, by paying attention.”  I want to honor it all: light and dark, joy and pain, beauty and ugliness.  All of it.

(Speaking of silver, those spoons are Grace and Whit’s, a gift on Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago.  I bought them here.)

A third child

The first time Grace met Whit.  January 20, 2005.
The first time I was with my two children.

I am done having babies.

I’ll say that again.  I will not have another baby.  We are going to be a family of four.  In our community, this sometimes feels counter-cultural.  There are a great many families with three and four children.

The truth is, for a long time, I felt torn about this.  I wrestled with whether or not to have a third baby.  I considered how high my odds of twins must be, with my father a fraternal twin (and he’s not the only one in my close family).  I thought about how we would have to move, and I love our house.  I thought about how much I wanted to live those disorienting, raw, extraordinary first months with a newborn one more time.

But ultimately, I realized was that what I really wanted was for this not to be over.  I want to have this phase of my life, this golden moment, not to end.  I wanted another opportunity to live – to do a better job in – all the weeks and months and years that have already clanged shut behind me.  And that is not the same as wanting a third child.  Understanding this distinction, which was somehow blunt and evasive at the same time, clarified everything for me.

I absolutely loved being pregnant.  My two labors were the most extraordinary and empowering experiences of my life.  While I struggled with my first infant, I reflect on that time – and, especially, on Whit’s babyhood- with enormous affection.

But I don’t want to have a third child.  I want to have another spin around the rink, to feel again that gasping, outrageous miracle of small feet inside my body, to surrender once more to the incandescent pain of birthing a baby.  But all of that is because I don’t want this to be over.  And in my heart of hearts, I feel as though our family is complete.  We are L, M, G, and W.  We fit.

Realizing this is not without a sense of real loss.  It is complicated and then, startlingly, simple.  We continue down the not-deciding road of “maybe, we’ll see, perhaps one day” and time slips away.  One day we realize that not-deciding was deciding.  And, while I wasn’t looking, those days I didn’t want to end, did.

And here we are.  Our family of four.  My Grace and my Whit.  My drum and my descant.  I would not have it any other way.

If you have children, how many do you have?  How did you know when you were “done,” if you are?  If not, how do you know that?