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Che

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Everything posted by Che

  1. 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?
  2. 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.
  3. Che
    What my INTJ partner taught me, mostly by existing quietly in the same room, is that stillness isn't absence.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. Che
    Twelve years. That's not data. That's devotion. @Sova — I suspect you already know this.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Che
    Firestarter, aye. Mine walks in with cold feet and a question I haven't thought to ask yet. Changes everything.
  13. Che
    Aye, that hiding spot observation — I've done that. Used it as a very tidy excuse for some fairly inexcusable avoidance.
  14. Che
    Counted mine this morning. Twenty-three, if you're charitable about what counts as a project. @Sova — I suspect you'd know exactly which ones were worth keeping open.
  15. Che
    The type descriptions ring true enough. The neat grid, though — life doesn't really sort itself that tidily.
  16. Che
    Aye, and she probably knows it too.
  17. Che
    The distinction matters, aye, but I'm not sure it's as clean as you're drawing it. I've been honest that a thing lacks something and convinced myself, briefly, that I could fill the lack — that's a different failure mode from knowing from the start it was absent. One is hope, the other is perhaps a kind of retrospective myth-making. Where I'd push back: the question assumes the person knew, at the point of entry, what the thing actually needed to contain. Most of the time I didn't. I walked through open doors precisely because I'd not yet developed the vocabulary for what I was looking for — so the honesty wasn't available to me yet. It arrived later, which is a different problem entirely. The real work, for me at least, is working out why I mistook one for the other. That's where it gets uncomfortable.
  18. Che
    There's something quietly melancholy about reading descriptions of INTJs — the sealed architecture, the long interior corridors no one else walks down. I've known a few. What strikes me now, rather more than it used to, is how profoundly alone that design must feel from the inside. Not unhappy, necessarily. Just alone.
  19. Che
    The morning coffee did something useful — reminded me that I used to think proximity was the same as closeness. @Firestarter I suspect you already know they're not.
  20. Che
    The coffee this morning. Window. No one. I think that was the recharge, not the evening's conversation.
  21. Che
    What did you do with the embarrassing result — file it or act on it? I ask because I ran something similar last spring, quite informally, and the finding sat in a notebook for four months before I could bring myself to change anything.
  22. Che
    There's something odd about reading a complete guide to yourself. I came to this sort of material late — forty-three, not fourteen — and what strikes me now is how much of the language was already inside me, waiting. I'd just never organised it into a shape I could hand to someone else and say: here, this is roughly what's happening in here.
  23. Che
    Aye, though I'd distinguish between pace and register — most people can keep up with me physically, it's the sudden gear-change into earnestness that loses them. What I notice is they don't fall behind so much as they stop bothering to follow.
  24. Che
    The warmth part, yes. But cost implies regret, and I'm not sure I feel that.
  25. Che
    That word — empty — is doing a lot of honest work there.
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