I’m a very introspective person. I used to be really into the MBTI Personality Test, and back in high school and a year or two after that I considered myself INTJ, because it fit me so well. I never learned the “functions”, because it didn’t interest me and it seemed like a chore to understand it. A good friend of mine knows a good deal more about it, though, and has since told me that I’m probably an INTP.

Now, I won’t go into a lecture about what MBTI is or what all the different functions are, because I admittedly am not that fluent in them myself, (and I also don’t believe that categorizing a thing as complex as people into a few things will ever work all the time), but I will say this. INTP’s strongest function is Introverted Thinking. Here’s a summary of what that means (taken from personalitygrowth.com)

People with Introverted Thinking want the world to make sense in a logical manner. They form an internal framework of how the world works. It is constantly being modified and improved through life experience and experiments.

Introverted Thinking’s goal is to create a web of knowledge in which everything is interrelated.

For example, someone with introverted thinking can find out how a car and all its parts work by relating it to some other system, such as a computer.

They have the ability to find commonalities in seemingly unrelated things.

Introverted Thinking is also great at troubleshooting. Someone with Ti can analyze something, figure out where the problem areas are, and fix them rather quickly.

I am always in my head thinking and adapting. I would say that for any given big event in my life, such as getting a car, completing college, moving out, etc., I devote a good amount of thought to every day. I’m constantly framing, organizing, and planning my day in both the short term and the long term. But this is actually not what I wanted to talk about in this post. This is context.

Because what has really fascinated me lately is that even with how much I as a person think about myself and try to psychoanalyze myself in a myriad of different ways, people can still see me better than I can just be watching and listening. I find that this is true for everything in life.

I can read another’s writing and point out every tiny little flaw as well as the glaring issues. I can critique character motivations and promises to the reader as well as mark grammar mistakes and missing (or extraneous) commas. But I cannot do that with my own work.

This is both interesting and depressing, because often in my writer’s group, I might come up with amazing changes to somebody’s scene. I’ll say “Instead of the characters having this conversation at home, it should be at the bar, because it will increase the tension and it will also make more sense when Character Y stumbles into them and everything falls into chaos.”

I’ll watch as the writer’s eyes light up and they say “Whoa, yeah, that’s an awesome idea! Thanks!”

The reason I find this frustrating is because I wish I could do that while reading my own work. I get bored with my writing a lot of the time, and things stop working, but I can’t read it and see what I would imagine to be glaring issues that are as easy to solve as the issues in other’s writing. It would be incredibly pompous for me to say that I want another me to read my work from the outside, but really I think that’s something we can all work on. My problem is that I’m in my head so much that I can’t get myself out of it. I find it impossible to read my own work as an editor because I always read it as the writer.

And to pull away from writing, I’ve thought “Z fact” about myself for a year or two now, but have been struggling with the why. Why do I think this way? Why am I so attached to what is logically an insignificant problem? Well, I was explaining this to that same friend the other day and he said that the answer I had been telling myself was wrong. And that the real explanation was “W fact” (I can’t use X fact, because it makes me think of X Factor).

You know, that last paragraph is awful and ambiguous, but I’m not going to delete it. I think it needs to live in shame for how awful that was. Let me try again, with examples. Let’s say there’s this huge waterslide. We’re talking 60 feet high or more. I want to be the sort of person that goes on over and over again, because it looks like it should be fun. But I can’t, because I’m not a strong swimmer, or the slide looks unsafe, or whatever.

But when I’m explaining this story, a friend might say, “Wait, you said 60 feet high? Dude, you’re afraid of heights.”

And then I’ll think, “Oh, yeah, that makes way more sense.”

It’s amazing that it really doesn’t matter how much you think about something, because sometimes all you need is for somebody to look at it from the outside.

Rambling over. See you next Monday!