Jump to content

Che

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    218

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Che

  1. Che
    Late. Tired. The experiment I'd run on myself would have ended the same way Sova's did, probably worse. @Azimuth — you built something from scratch. I wonder if you ever A/B tested that decision, or if it just went. The embarrassing result is usually the true one.
  2. Che
    The furniture metaphor is doing real work there — the door you stop seeing is worse than a closed one, I think, because at least a closed door requires a decision. What I notice in myself is a kind of proud, unconscious domestication of possibility. I arrange the open doors. I live around them. I've gotten rather comfortable knowing they're there without ever walking through them, and the comfort itself becomes the point — not the threshold, not whatever's on the other side, just the reassurance of access. Optionality as identity, aye, exactly that. Though I'd add: sometimes it's not even identity anymore. It's just habit. The door stopped being a door. You stopped being a person who might leave through it. And somehow that happened without ceremony, without you noticing, on some ordinary afternoon when you were thinking about something else entirely.
  3. Che
    Every INTJ I've known has been exhausted by articles about INTJs. Something in that.
  4. Che
    There's something in this that I've been circling for a while, so I'll try to be precise. I'd partly agree and partly complicate it. Solitude for me isn't where I go to stay myself — it's where I go to find out if there's a self to stay. Which sounds more dramatic than I mean it to. What I notice is that after a long run of company, conversation, all the lovely noise of engagement, I don't know what I actually think about anything. I'm still vibrating at the frequency of whoever I was last with. Solitude doesn't preserve that. It dissolves it. And then, slowly, something quieter underneath becomes audible. Whether that quieter thing is more authentically me, I honestly couldn't say. The image I keep returning to — and I'm not sure I have language for this properly — is tuning a radio. Company is static and signal both at once. Solitude is when you can hear which is which. But I suspect the framing of opposite might be where I'd push back gently. For me, at least, solitude and company aren't opposites; they're a sequence. I need both, in order, and the order matters. If I'm alone first I'm not properly present with anyone. If I'm with people too long I've lost the thread of myself entirely. So perhaps less: solitude is where we stay ourselves. More: solitude is where we remember we have a self at all. Which is different, I think, though I'd not thought that through until just now.
  5. Che
    Aye, that's the variable that invalidates the model and makes the model worth having.
  6. Che
    There's a specific discomfort in being accurately described by a category — as though the category knew you first. @Azimuth I suspect founding something is one long argument with your own type. Am I wrong?
  7. Che
    Fourteen years in, and I still don't always know whether a silence between us is comfortable or just — suspended. There's a difference. I'm not sure I have language for it yet.
  8. Che
    Eight years and that's your takeaway. The warmth isn't rare — the consistency of it is.
  9. Che
    Every open door lets the draught in. I've spent forty years not noticing I was cold.
  10. Che
    Twelve years and I'd wager you're still sometimes wrong, @docTrine — but wrongly certain is its own kind of data, I suppose.
  11. Che
    What strikes me, reading a guide like this, is how differently the same type can wear itself depending on the life lived inside it. I'm ENFP, discovered late — mid-forties — and the description fits, but it fits the way an old coat fits: recognisably mine, shaped by years of particular weather. The categories are real enough. It's the texture they can't quite hold.
  12. Che
    Aye, the screaming laptop is the body doing the work the mind won't.
  13. Che
    There's a man on the bus I take Wednesdays who reads self-help books with the covers facing outward. I used to find that endearing. Lately I find it irritating, and I've been trying to work out whether that irritation is really about him. I think it's about me. Specifically about the fact that I tell people I'm an ENFP and then immediately feel I've done something slightly undignified — like I've handed them a laminated version of myself and said, here, this will save us both some time. The thing is, I don't think that embarrassment is wrong. It's pointing at something real about what taxonomy does to a person. Flatten, compress, offer false tidiness. And yet. The type got certain things right about me that I hadn't managed to name in forty-odd years. That's not nothing. So I hold the embarrassment and I hold that. Awkwardly. Does anyone else find themselves doing the same?
  14. Che
    There's something in this, though I'd push it slightly — for me the thinking doesn't so much finish in solitude as it stops performing, which is not quite the same thing. In translation you learn that a sentence can look complete and still be lying.
  15. Che
    What my INTJ partner taught me, mostly by existing quietly in the same room, is that stillness isn't absence.
  16. Che
    The cost accrues like interest you forgot you were paying. You don't notice until you check the balance — and the number is rather larger than you expected.
  17. Che
    My mother used to say I was a lot of weather for one person. @docTrine, I suspect you've thought that about Bea. More than once.
  18. Che
    Twelve years. That's not data. That's devotion. @Sova — I suspect you already know this.
  19. Che
    Aye, and I've been sitting with this one. There's a particular kind of book — I'm thinking of those old Choose Your Own Adventure things, though the same logic applies to more serious literature — where every page ends with a fork. Go to 47 or go to 83. What nobody ever pointed out to me as a child is that not choosing is also a choice, and so is reading every branch until the book falls apart in your hands. What I notice is that closing a door has a texture to it that opening one doesn't. Opening feels like possibility, which we're told is always good. Closing feels like loss, which we're told to avoid. But there's something else in it — something that I'm not sure I have language for exactly — a kind of consolidation, maybe. A narrowing that is also a deepening. You give a thing your whole weight instead of distributing yourself thinly across everything available. I suspect the trouble for people like us isn't really about the doors at all. It's that we've been trained — by temperament, by habit, possibly by some early experience of scarcity — to read closure as foreclosure. Permanent. Irreversible. Whereas in practice, most doors you close can be reopened, or you find there was a window anyway. You're right that it gets lost. I'd add: it gets lost specifically because choosing to close reads as passive, even cowardly, when it's often the harder and more deliberate act.
  20. Che
    There's something a little taxing about reading affectionate portraits of INTJs — all that cool architecture, the lone genius tidying the universe. I know a few. They're messier than this.
  21. Che
    Forty-three characters, apparently. I keep expecting that to feel like a key fitting a lock. It doesn't, quite. More like a very accurate description of the house.
  22. Che
    The week I stopped editing in cafés and worked only from the flat, I expected to feel grounded. More output, fewer interruptions. What I actually felt was a low, persistent flatness — functional, but hollowed out somehow. The data said I'd produced more. It was right. I'd also, quietly, stopped caring about what I was producing. The embarrassing thing isn't the result. It's realising energy and output were never the same variable.
  23. Che
    There's a particular kind of fatigue that comes at the end of a good conversation — not tiredness exactly, but a slow draining, like a bath going cold after the warmth was real. I've started to recognise that as the cost the article is naming. The warmth was genuine. So was what it took.
  24. Che
    Firestarter, aye. Mine walks in with cold feet and a question I haven't thought to ask yet. Changes everything.
  25. Che
    Aye, that hiding spot observation — I've done that. Used it as a very tidy excuse for some fairly inexcusable avoidance.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

USE OF COOKIES We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue.