Reading an old friend's blog from the past led me to ponder a little about myself.
You know, many years ago (okay just 3) there was a little bit of craze over personality profiling. Looking back in 20/20 hindsight, it seems now that those days were filled with that classic psychological condition where one reads about something supposed to describe oneself, likes it and reinforces his belief that this is true. I'm sure there's a name for such a condition and ordinarily I'd spend upwards of an entire afternoon finding about it on wikipedia, reading it to its entirety whilst clicking every single link that sounded interesting and then also clicking links within those links and so on and so forth. I guess that's where a good large portion of my teenage youth went to huh.
And so, in those days, the very first personality test I took classified me as an INTP. Yup, if you'll only google a little about it you will find plenty of nuggets of information about it, such as that particular personality type being of Einstein's and more about the Myer-Briggs Type Indicator.
But I digress.
Anyway, after reading the text provided to me by ACJC to describe how people of our type acted, I got a little interested and decided to do serious googling and did numerous online tests to verify that and pored through the associated reading material. Lots of my thoughts are pretty well encapsulated in my past blogs which you should have no trouble finding. Needless to say, when it comes to Matthaeus, "a little" is a little bit of an understatement.
After going through catcheism class and other things, namely, army, the recent stumbling onto my friend's blog encouraged yet another thought provoking experience. Have I changed? Am I still an INTP? Do I still want to be an INTP? Do I want to change?
Ordinarily, I'd go through the whole gamut of tests all over again to, well, "check myself out". Again, the 20 year old me is no longer bothered with such impulsive thoughts. In pokemon terms, I've levelled up a few times, so to speak, and now focus on bigger things. Which may not necessarily refer to them being that much better.
So, what's changed? Nothing much, really. Being myself still feels like myself and there's nothing really new about that. But hey wait, there seems to be a lot less energy, a lot more cynicism, less hyperactiveness on facebook (but maybe cause of twitter), apathy towards mousehunt, can't care less about msn, and wait for it... I haven't played dota by myself at home in months!
Is that what the grown ups call maturity? I don't know. The underlying major issues still seem to be there, the extremely short attention span when listening to speakers, the associated mind drifting and inability to sit still in church service, the almost Sheldon Cooper-like condescension when when someone gets his or her ideas wrong and most dangerously, the chronic judgement (usually made after the initial moments of my impression) that a certain person will never be smarter than myself.
And wait, I still do have all those geek hobbies. Reading about the latest tech, messing around with the mac, doing personal study on war history and modern geopolitics, thrashing thoughts about theoretical physics and lately fussing over audiophile equipment.
And well, if my memory serves me well (admittedly, it usually does in regard to matters such as this with a few embarassing exceptions), those indeed are some of the classic traits of an INTP.
But then, if you do detailed reads on all the other traits within the MBTI system, which I have, the memory of which has been stored in some dark corner of my gray matter, awaiting an eventual recall for an irrelevant situation or fading away uselessly as is the fate of most of what I read... Wait I digressed again. Well, all the other traits do have their own quirks. So we all have our weaknesses, however much we try to hide it or present it as attractively as possible.
So do we let ourselves subscribe to this system, formulated most incidentally by an INTP himself? Am I going to let myself be defined by what another human thinks about people like me?
There is no right personality that we should look up to. As Christians we are called to become like Christ and nope, I don't recall ever reading that he had any weaknesses. So why should we let ourselves be limited by what others say of us? Why should I let myself be limited by what others say of me?
Dear God, thank you for what you did two thousand-ish years ago. Please change me for who you want me to be though it will be so difficult and painful. Destroy my resistance to your change. By the way, I do have a place in your Kingdom, right?
This is the war of my life.
