Recently, my work encouraged employees to complete the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality assessment to learn a little bit about ourselves and our coworkers. It’s a quiz that algorithmically figures out which of 16 different personality types best describe you. It breaks your preferences down into the way you direct and receive energy (either extraverted or introverted), the way you take in information (either by sensing or intuition), the way you make decisions (by thinking or feeling), and the way you approach the outside world (judging or perceiving). Basically the scientific version of getting sorted into your Hogwarts house (Hufflepuff all the way).
As it turns out, I am an ENFP which means that I am extraverted, intuitive, feeling, and perceiving. I’m very observant to things that affect me (which often feels like everything) and when I feel something, I feel it a lot. I’m an overly sensitive and excitable idiot who wants to make the world a better place, but might not be using the most effective methods (see: emotional outbursts and general “too much”-ness) Good intentions, poor execution; like I said, Hufflepuff.
(Don’t worry. I know Seamus is a Gryffindor, he just serves to illustrate my point.)
Learning about emotional preferences got me thinking about how people’s personalities and actions can easily be influenced by certain situations or even other people. It’s important to realize how many sides to themselves each person has and that maybe that one negative thing you know about them might not be the whole picture. Sometimes your actions are just a reaction and it’s not fair for people to make assumptions about who you are based off of that. Negative times in your life do not fully reflect the person you know you are.
Rumors are started on fragments of stories, and reputations are often ruined by exaggerations of the truth. It’s so easy when we don’t see the whole picture to make assumptions about people and see a certain version of them with no hope of reformation. I know how painful it is to walk into a room and know that everyone was just talking about you, and I know how hopeless it can seem to try and change the way you know you are viewed. Lately I’ve been making mental efforts to try and consider the other facts, the quiet truths that don’t get told, when I’m faced with negative feelings towards someone. I like to think that what you put into the world comes back to you, and at the end of the day we’re all just floating on this tiny rock hurtling through space, trying our best.
But I guess that’s what I’m afraid of. People who don’t fully know me but think they do. People who believe stories they are told rather than simply asking the source. Not having control over how I’m seen is terrifying to me and not being able to explain myself feels even worse. I often worry that people will only ever see me as one incident rather than the reason that incident occurred. Then I try to remedy the situation, usually growing it into something worse, and creating a new story to get passed around.
Sometimes It’s hard to feel like you have a good grip on yourself when so many other people seem to be saying something different. It’s hard to feel like you ever knew yourself sometimes, when you know that people will only see one small sliver of you. And you almost want to scream at them to explain it, but then, of course, now you’ve only proven them right. But I feel like, on my slow journey of self-identification, it’s helpful to understand how certain things affect you. Knowing how you might be inclined to react in a situation might help you to make a more positive choice.
Feeling more in tune with my emotions has helped to take a little bit of blame off. I know that few people mean to be hurtful intentionally, and I know that I never want to actually hurt someone, but I also know now why certain things do hurt, and why I might react the way I do. I also now know not to react, but I can’t say anything for Past Paige.
But that’s kind of the thing. We’re always growing, and we’ll simultaneously never be smarter or more stupid than we are right now. You don’t know the things you don’t know. And that might have caused you to do some things in the past that you never would have done now. I can’t change the things I’ve done, and I can’t change the way people see me because of that. But I can change the way I consider other people and the way I see myself. Really all you can do is apologize and move on, knowing that you’re working every day to your best self, and someday people will see that, as long as you make an effort to see it in them.
Good luck out there, friends and fellow ENFPs.
Paige Rita 