Ebenezer

Yesterday I gathered a pile of rocks.

The idea came from a conversation that I had had the previous weekend. A friend came to visit. I can’t remember how the conversation turned to Myers-Briggs personality types, but it did.

I am an INTJ.

The first time I took the test — maybe in the 80s — I was off-the-scale Introvert, and overall INTJ. The introvert doesn’t bother me. I understand that. I TOTALLY need alone time.

It’s the rest of the personality that I haven’t learned to appreciate. To break it down, I is for introversion (opposite: extroversion), N is for Intuition (opposite: sensing), T is for Thinking (opposite: feeling), and J is for Judging (opposite: perceiving).

I’ve taken the test multiple times, spaced out over years and years. Always the same result — INTJ.

Famous INTJs: Elon Musk, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lenin, Mark Zuckerberg, Ayn Rand, Jodi Foster, Hilary Clinton.

Ugh. Every time I look at a list of INTJs, I see overly-ambitious people that I wouldn’t want to have dinner with. (Okay — maybe I would like to have dinner with Jodi Foster.) That’s not really fair to them.

Some of my children are INTJs. I absolutely ADORE them and LOVE having dinner with them. They love to learn. They think outside the box. They come up with innovative solutions. It’s easy to see the positives in them.

In my conversation last weekend, my friend asked, “What are the good points of an INTJ?”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” I replied.

I knew that I should have an answer to that question.

Hence my pile of rocks.

I want to learn to embrace my INTJ-ness.

So I made two lists of INTJ attributes: one positive, or strengths; the other negative, or weaknesses.

It’s scary how well they describe me. What I WANT to do is pair up positives and negatives, and then write each pairing on a rock.

For instance, I see Self-confidence being misread as Arrogance. They belong on the same rock.

When I was in high school, I remember overhearing someone say that I was “stuck-up” — aka arrogant. I knew arrogant girls. They sat in the lunch room and talked about everyone. They didn’t think, but they KNEW that they were better than the riff-raff that surrounded them.

I did not want to be part of that group so I sat with a bunch of boys and played card games at lunch.

I was quiet, and didn’t always join things, especially things the other girls did. I suppose that can be read as stuck-up. The truth was that I didn’t feel like I fit in. Self-confidence, I guess, allowed me to see that I didn’t fit in and told me that I didn’t have to change who I was. I wish I understood that better in those days.

I suppose that too much self-confidence CAN lead to arrogance. Someone may start actually believing that they are better than others. I don’t think that’s a trap I’ve fallen into. God help me if I have.

But here I go, blathering on, when I really wanted to ask for a little help. How would you pair up those strengths and weaknesses? Do I really need to pair them? Should I just write them?

I want my little pile of rocks to remind me to be my best me, not my worst.