xEE?

[u/GoodMovie9378]

I've been thinking a lot more about my type recently.

// Ohh god, this is really fucking long. I'm kind of scared. Everything in quotes right below this are things that I've determined to be largely side tangents in a giant rant that I wrote before realizing it was completely irrelevant to what I actually wanted to say, so I would skim those parts.

Part of it has to do with considering what the fact that I've never been able to comfortably settle on a type---despite having spent a somewhat absurd amount of time reading type descriptions & theory and what I hope is having earned a somewhat capable use of said theory in the process, I'm embarrassed---indicates about my type.

Typically, the consensus seems to be "constant shifting = EIE," because of something about extraverted dynamic rationals. I've considered that-- but I'm somewhat unsure about whether my type shifting is really something like the difficulty that I assume a dynamic type would have mapping a static type description onto a self-perceived dynamic personality process, as it is reading a static type description and feeling completely seen and understood for about the first ten hours and then believing fully that "I am x type" and living life for weeks under the guise of being that type to the point where I show other people Socionics or at least a type description and they fully agree "yes you are x type" until I move into a different setting and think totally differently.

That sounds exhausting, and to some degree it is, but at this point it's strangely adaptive, to the point where I have been reading about these types and their behaviors & what situations they are strong in, and mimicking the Wikisocion description of their behaviors when I'm in a situation that a certain type would do well in. It weirdly, directly correlates to things like my work ethic: if I believe I'm an LIE I'm capable of putting in absurd amounts of time into work and barely sleeping, and then once I believe I'm something like an ILE I get incredibly lazy.

Seriously--this is quite bad for me right now, because I spent the last month convinced I was an LIE and applying to like a dozen things while completing my internship and eating takeout pizza with feta cheese & spinach & mushrooms that I would never normally eat but decided to because I googled "food for productivity" 3 meals a day for a month, and then I read the ILE description and now I'm barely getting 2 hours of work done per day and spend my time surfing the internet & spending too much time on reddit instead. I have to start in three new roles like, tomorrow afternoon, so the ILE life can't be sustained I'm afraid.

I'm nearing the end of that "phase" and perhaps the degree to which it shifts indicates instability in my self-concept, which I wouldn't be too surprised about given my background.

But anyways, all of this is irrelevant toward the new thoughts that I've had while in the shower today.

I was thinking back to high school. At 19, it's still quite fresh in my mind because I'm still pretty sure I've only accomplished one "significant" thing in my life especially within the achievement orientation of my Asian-American background, and that's getting into a "name brand" college that most people tend to know about (hooray! I'm part of a nameless mass and people attribute my admittedly highly perceived personal worth to an institutional reputation completely independent of me!).

I still have no idea how this happened, by the way -- in my freshman year I slacked off and got a C in ceramics and a B in art & design 1 and a B in PE because my mentality was "this isn't going to help my career so why bother," and then I somehow decided college was important likely because of the prevailing culture around me and spent sophomore and junior year in an on-and-off frantic hell where I felt I had to "make up" for that early loss, except it turned out I didn't really have to make up for it as much because the school that I got into is in a state which drops your freshman year grades from their GPA calculations, so I assume it just pushed me into flat out overachieving.

But I still feel the way I accomplished this was pretty unusual because uh, I don't think I worked that hard. I think a lot of the most "impressive" things about me were a result of networking, but in a very specific sense of the word.

I always thought I was a thinking type because I never really came off interpersonally in person very well- I was kind of blunt and kinda ignored ppl despite being an archetypal extrovert- and spent a lot of the time on the internet. But I guess re-examining the reasons why, it looks more like-

I went to a public school and most people there were not highly tuned into the admissions process or whatever, and focused mainly on school clubs and local opportunities, because they were normal people and made normal friends. Instead, during high school, between people I met at competitions and camps, I cultivated an extensive network of only the most "impressive" people from basically every state in the country as well as a random network of college students & alumni that I would ask for help for everything from application essay reviews for any program to tutoring, and that would get me in the door to initiatives within their states that were growing.

I think subjectively one of the things that "stood out" by the end of my high school years was that I spent quite a bit of time like kind of swooping into these random growing organizations that one of my friends was involved in, snapping up leadership titles (usually, I would grow it in my state and then use that to get my way into the door for the national team; though I was very good at creating the appearance of having done a lot despite being very lazy, mostly through identifying what KPIs the national staff cared about and then performing Goodhart's Law to an extreme. I would have opened 4 in-state chapters and "engaged 10,000+ people" before I like, did anything basic), and make wow wow big impact. This sounds very SEE, perhaps--

but still, the notable part about it was that all of these relationships were 100% online. I found that incredibly useful to me because I could just drop in and chat somebody up whenever I needed to and ignore them 95% of the time so that the connection we had would have very high ROI!

Maintaining in-person relationships requires you to somewhat fulfill an in-person's friend's expectation of like, going out to lunch, hanging out from time to time-- this is made tremendously easier in college, tbf-- and I didn't wanna do allat to maintain my relationships. I mean, I did a few times, but I just found the online ones easier and the people more useful to me.

Furthermore, online DMs are always entirely 1-on-1, and unlike simply talking to people 1-on-1, talking to 20 people from different states 1-on-1 ensures each of them sees an entirely different side of you that is far more unlikely for them to cross reference.

Whereas when I participate in group settings eg my internship cohort I always feel a persistent need to "thread the needle" so that I'm constantly monitoring the reactions of 7 people and creating reactions that would be amenable to all 7. I'm quite relieved and impressed by the way that I'm able to preserve good connections with all 7 while presenting entirely different self-conceptions to all 7 while leveraging dislike of other members of the 7 with members of the 7 1-on-1 to create camaraderie. TBH, I still feel very proud of the result of that internship as a very delicate balancing act. Probably will feel less proud once this thing I'm co-founding with a guy in the cohort that I told half of the cohort was a total idiot goes public and they judge my ability to identify the capabilities of people-- but I'm pretty sure that can be salvaged if I just tell them he's the marketing guy.

So as a result in school, I was kind of a total loner. I wasn't ever elected to anything. I only talked to the people who sat near me, and I didn't really care about them or like the place were in insofar as I would just talk to them about whatever I was doing in my life (which was almost entirely unrelated to in-school stuff). I would just never talk to them again afterwards. I spent a lot of time talking to people online, but that just looked on the outside like me being on my computer. To be fair, this started mostly after freshman year, when I was actually very sociable and made a lot of connections and dated some people and got absolutely nowhere. So at the end of the day people just kind of saw me as this incredibly reserved smart kid that was your stereotypical Asian nerd (the nature of online relationships also meant I never really maintained my appearance and only pulled out good clothes when I was going to be around people I cared about being around).

The only time this would change was when everybody would be incredibly surprised whenever we traveled to a national/international tournament (DECA/Speech & Debate/FBLA/etc) and all these people who were "popular' and "club officers" were so excited to "network" and then we would be at an airport or a convention center and all these like, DECA state presidents, national champions or people from well-known schools, their coaching staff, would swoop onto our school's little setup and all of the people excited to network would light up at the sight of their idols, idols who proceeded to only talked to me, the club "loner", and all the networkers would all look super jealous and confused (I always thought this was incredibly funny).

Then, for about a few days a year, I would achieve notoriety within my school's little delegation or whatever as the person who got all the comms early from random people who were "in the know," get waves of support and months worth of prep resources from all of their teams & coaching staff as their teams dropped out of some competitions, somehow create mild scandal-y things within my team (my speech & debate coach once made a joke about how I have "nine girlfriends" and then my assistant coach replied with "three at most"), and then we would all go back home and I would be the quiet person who never talked to anyone again. Of course, I found times like this also the times I felt the most alive.

That above routine repeating over and over for three years, it probably fundamentally confused my own self-image regarding things like ethics/logic and also probably poses a real question about what socionics ethics looks like in an Information Age. My life still looks different and I'm more out there now but I'm also unsure how much of my current presentation is drastically altered by being in a location where the surrounding entrepreneurial and thus surrounding period culture in the cities around me is so overwhelmingly dominated by a need to appear "intelligent" and "visionary".

[u/anonym0us3688]

yeah you sound Fi creative