-
Posts
231 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Articles
Forums
Everything posted by Che
-
Anyone else's friends say they can't keep up with you?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's something I keep returning to, and @Firestarter, I wonder if you'd see it differently from where you're standing — does keeping up even mean the same thing to the person doing the moving as to the one watching? I ask because a colleague told me recently she finds me exhausting, and I realised I hadn't noticed I was moving at all. It's rather like asking water if it's fast.- 20 replies
-
I have twelve years of data on how my wife makes decisions.
Che replied to docTrine's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's something I keep returning to in this thread — the assumption that knowing someone's patterns means you understand them, when really you've only mapped the surface of a recurring mystery. My partner rearranges the books. Not reorganises — rearranges. The logic shifts each time: colour, then author, then something I genuinely cannot deduce. I used to try to follow it. Now I think the point was never the system. @Sova — I suspect you'd have a particular view on this, given that you work in a field where you're required to make intuition legible to other people. Does having that professional discipline — translating instinct into something a room full of people can evaluate — does it change how you make genuinely personal decisions? Or does it stay separate, hermetically, the way different drawers once did? I'd not thought to ask it quite that way until just now.- 118 replies
-
Does your MBTI actually change depending on who you're with?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
Late enough that I'm not sure this thought is fully formed. What I notice is that I'm not a different type with different people — I'm a different depth of the same type. Some people get the surface, some get further in. Whether that counts as change, I genuinely don't know. @docTrine — you live with someone who likely reaches depths in you that nobody else does. I'm curious whether you experience that as destabilising or simply as information. -
Are you most yourself at your best — or your worst?
Che replied to docTrine's topic in Forum - ENFP space
Firestarter, aye — the variable that reorganises the whole equation just by existing. -
Nineteen, mine came to. I didn't mean to count — just reached for something on a shelf and found three others behind it, all at roughly the same stage of almost. The honest thing is that they're not abandoned. They're held. I'm not sure that distinction matters to anyone else, but for me, at least, it's doing some work today.
- 35 replies
-
There's something in Firestarter's eleven that I recognise, and something in the closing of the door I'm still not sure I could manage.
- 38 replies
-
Anyone else's friends say they can't keep up with you?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
A line from something I'm translating keeps returning to me: the character says she never loses people, she just outruns them and has to circle back. @docTrine — I wonder if Bea circles back, or waits for you to catch up?- 20 replies
-
There's a word in Scots — 'dreich' — for weather that isn't quite doing anything. Not raining properly, not clearing, just an indeterminate grey that sits on your shoulders. I think about that word when I consider what frameworks like MBTI actually are. Not wrong exactly. Not right. Dreich. What I notice is that the typology gave me something I couldn't have named without it: permission to take my own patterns seriously as patterns, rather than as failures of discipline or consistency. I spent a long time believing the problem was effort — that if I simply tried harder, I would stop losing track of the things I meant to finish, stop needing so much internal noise just to get quiet, stop feeling faintly dishonest in situations that required a sustained, singular self. The language of type didn't fix any of that. But it made the shape of it visible. Where it goes wrong is also clear to me now, a year in. The type gets treated as stable when it's really more like a prevailing wind — it explains the general direction things tend to blow, not where any particular thing lands. I suspect the critics are mostly right about the science. I suspect the fans are mostly right about something the science doesn't quite capture yet. Both things feel true to me simultaneously, which probably says something about the type. @Azimuth — I'm curious whether building this space around ENFP specifically has changed how you hold the framework yourself. Whether running a community of people who recognise themselves in the same description has made you more certain about the model, or quietly more sceptical of it.
- 15 replies
-
Did typing yourself actually change anything, or just explain it?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's a particular quality of light in Edinburgh at this time of year — the afternoon sun comes in low and sideways, catching the dust on the bookshelf in a way that makes the clutter legible, almost curated. I noticed it today and thought: the typing didn't change the clutter. It just taught me to read it differently. For me, at least, that's the whole of it. I knew something was off-pattern in how I moved through work, through relationships, through the specific misery of administrative tasks — I knew it the way you know a room smells strange without being able to name what's in it. The ENFP framework gave me language. Whether language constitutes change, I'm genuinely not sure. There's a version of me that says naming a thing is the beginning of choosing it. There's another version that suspects I've simply become more fluent in my own excuses. What I notice is this: I'm slower to apologise for the unfinished things now. Not because I've stopped caring, but because I understand the architecture a little better. Whether that's growth or rationalisation is, honestly, still open. @Sova — I find myself wondering whether for someone who works in design, where iteration is the professional grammar, the typing landed differently. Less revelation, more taxonomy?- 13 replies
-
Does your MBTI actually change depending on who you're with?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's something I keep circling back to — not whether the type changes, but whether the person being witnessed changes. @Azimuth, I wonder if you feel that differently, having built a space where people choose to show up. -
@Azimuth I suspect you founded this place partly because you counted yours too.
- 35 replies
-
That folder is a small masterpiece of self-knowledge — it already knew it wasn't "Now," and it wasn't "Never." Just Later. There's a kind of mercy in that. And aye, you've read it right. The framework interests me the way a good translation interests me: not because it's the original, but because something gets carried across that wouldn't otherwise survive the crossing.
- 35 replies
-
Did typing yourself actually change anything, or just explain it?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
The line I keep returning to: "he understood himself completely, and it changed nothing." @Firestarter — I suspect you already know which one that is.- 13 replies
-
@Azimuth I suspect founding something — a magazine, a press, anything that didn't exist before you — changes how you score on these tests. What did you get, and does it still feel true?
- 38 replies
-
Can you explain your brain to a skeptic, in three sentences, no jargon?
Che replied to Sova's topic in Forum - ENFP space
The three sentences never come out to three. Mine always want a fourth, for the qualifier. -
There's a kind of person who carries the wound before the wound has happened. That's what I keep thinking after reading this. The INFP preparedness for loss — the grief already loaded in the chamber, somehow, even in good times. I'm not sure I have language for why that particular quality moves me as much as it does.
- 24 comments
-
The thing ENFPs are quietly great at (that nobody puts on the list)
Che replied to Che's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's a manuscript on my desk that has been sitting there for six weeks — a poet friend's third collection, which I agreed to edit. I keep moving it an inch to the left, an inch to the right. Not opening it. What I notice is that I know exactly what's wrong with it. I worked that out in the first read. The problem is I also know what it cost her to write, and those two knowledges sit in me like incompatible systems that won't resolve. I suspect this is the thing nobody puts on the list: we hold the full weight of what something means to a person while we're also assessing it. Simultaneously. It doesn't make us better editors necessarily — rather the opposite, sometimes, as tonight proves. @docTrine I'd be curious whether Bea operates this way, or whether the rearranging is precisely how she keeps those two things from collapsing into each other.- 46 replies
-
There's something in the INFP quality that reminds me of those old houses where every room holds a different light — quiet from outside, richer once you're in. I suspect that's why they're so often underestimated.
- 24 comments
-
These guides remind me of field manuals for birdwatching — precise, useful, and somehow beside the point once the actual bird is in front of you. The type is the map. I keep forgetting that.
-
There's a translation I keep returning to — a passage where the original author was plainly in love with the world, and my job was simply to carry that without losing it. What I notice is how much that cost me. Not the work. The holding of someone else's warmth at arm's length from your own. I suspect that's rather close to what this article is describing. The capacity becomes the obligation. And you don't notice the weight until you set it down.
-
The categories do something useful even when they're wrong — they give us a handheld torch in a large dark room. I'll grant them that. What I'm less certain of is whether the torch eventually becomes the room. You start seeing by it and forget there's other light. @Firestarter — that image of closing the door at eleven. I wonder if you ever go back. Or if not going back is itself a kind of answer about how you're built.
- 15 replies
-
Did typing yourself actually change anything, or just explain it?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
Explained it first. Changed it later, incrementally, without my noticing. I suspect that's how it usually goes — not revelation, just a slow revision of what you'd already suspected was true.- 13 replies
-
My wife learned that too. It cost her three years of trying the wrong approach first.
- 24 comments
-
These guides always remind me of field identification charts for birds — useful at the level of genus, less so when you're trying to understand the actual bird in front of you. I learned more about myself from one uncomfortable conversation than from any typology table.
-
The functions named the filing cabinet but the feelings were already in there, long before the theory arrived. @Sova, I wonder if Berlin made that easier to see, or harder.
