I’ve always been a sucker for personality tests. Whenever I come across one, I have to take it, no matter how silly the test itself may seem. So it’s going to tell me what meme I am based on my favorite girl scout cookie? Bring it on! That’s obviously something that I need to know about myself, right? (Tagalongs and Meryl Streep, btw). I just think that I’m fascinated by personality. Humans are so similar in so many ways; what is it that gives us our distinctive temperaments, makes us make different choices, makes us see the world differently? That’s (part of the reason) why I’ve always taken my Hogwarts house to an unreasonably serious extent, and why I keep getting sucked into endless rounds of Buzzfeed quizzes. I’m not entirely sure where the desire to have a test tell me about myself comes from. Mostly, I think it’s about being able to understand myself better because that’s not something I’m always able to do. I know what makes my friends and family tick, but what makes me tick? I usually have no clue. So I take personality tests, hoping that they will give me some insight.
I first came across the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (commonly called MBTI) in my AP Psych class last year as a senior in high school. We all took the test as part of our unit on personality. The test assigns you four letters based on your answers to its questions. E for extraverted or I for introverted, S for sensing or N for intuition, T for thinking or F for feeling, and P for perceiving or J for judging. There are 16 types total. I’ve taken the test a few times, and I’ve always gotten the same result: INFJ. You can take the test here. When I read the description for my type, I was surprised by how remarkably accurate it was. There were little things it mentioned about the INFJ personality that just seemed familiar to me, like idealism, a strong sense of empathy, a love of closure, the way that I can come across as standoffish to people I don’t know very well, and the way that I prefer writing over speaking. They were things about my personality that I recognized but hadn’t been able to put into words. I was amazed and completely sold on Myers-Briggs.
What followed was me going down a bit of a Myers-Briggs rabbit hole. I made my parents take it. I tried to get my brother to take it (he wouldn’t). I influenced many of my friends to take it. Of the friends who had taken it, I would send them things on Pinterest that had to do with their type. My dad wasn’t very interested in the whole thing, to which I was like, “Typical ENFP.” You see, I don’t do things casually. When I do something, I do it all the way. I wanted to understand everybody. I would search for INFJ things on the internet and always be delighted when they rang true. Of course, sometimes I would come across things I didn’t like. There was one source that claimed the INFJs are the most unlucky in love of all the types, the most likely to end up alone. There was another that said INFJs will never feel completely understood by those around them, even with those they are closest to. Those made me unhappy, because they were things that I always wondered might be true, and this seemed like a confirmation. I also realized that I was starting to unconsciously pigeonhole myself into this type. Knowing that I got INFJ, and seeing all of these things that said that INFJs are a certain way, I started to believe that I must be that way. I assumed, because of the way that I recognized myself in the general description of the INFJ, that there was a rigidity to my personality that in reality just wasn’t there.
I came to a realization, something that I really should have remembered all along: you can’t reduce the world’s 7 billion people to just 16 different types. People are so much more complex than that. I still really like the MBTI, because it’s a useful tool in helping me understand how the way that I see the world differs from the way that other people see the world. I’m still always interested in other people’s types as well. But I also decided that I can’t let it define my identity, which I was, stuck down the rabbit hole, starting to let it do. Nothing about a person is so simple that they can be expressed with just four letters. Yes, I am an INFJ, but I’m also so much more than that.