Che

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 architectural. I noticed this earlier, sitting with my second coffee, and I found myself looking at the pile on the corner of my desk: a galley proof I've been meaning to annotate, a Cantonese phrasebook I bought when my mother was ill and haven't opened since, a slim collection of poems by a poet I love but somehow cannot finish. All of it patient. All of it quietly indicting me. I'd done the test — the official one, not one of the abbreviated knockoffs — about fourteen months ago now, and the Ne explanation hit something I'd spent decades mislabelling as weakness or moral failure. The starting without finishing. The enthusiasms that burn clean and then go cold. What I notice is that the framing shifted for me not from shame to pride, which would have been too easy and probably dishonest, but from shame to something more like curiosity. I'm not sure I have language for the precise texture of it. It's closer to: oh, so this is what's been happening. What interests me now, a year on, is that the insight didn't change the behaviour. The phrasebook is still there. I suspect that was naïve to expect — that understanding an architectural feature of yourself simply removes the rubble it creates. The rubble is still rubble. What changes is perhaps the relationship to it: I see it more clearly now, annotate it differently, feel less like I'm failing and more like I'm observing a pattern that has its own internal logic, even when that logic costs me things I'd rather not lose.

The 'chaotic creative' label is doing a lot of heavy lifting, isn't it. I've had the same thing — someone finds out, tilts their head slightly, and then you watch them file you away under a category they already had prepared, like pulling a folder from a drawer that was already labelled before you walked in. What I notice is that the reduction usually flatters the person doing it more than it describes you. It lets them feel they've understood something without the inconvenience of actually paying attention. And there's something in the ENFP profile specifically — the enthusiasm, the range of interests, the way we move between registers — that makes us easy to caricature, because we do contain recognisable surface features of the caricature. The chaos is real, sometimes. The creativity is real. But the Pinterest-quote version of those things has had all the specificity bleached out of it. I spent a good few months after discovering this type feeling a wee bit ambushed by how accurately some of it described me, and simultaneously irritated that anyone who heard the label immediately thought they knew what that meant. There's a man I work with — careful, methodical, deeply sceptical of anything resembling self-help — who asked me once why I was reading about personality types. I said something about finding it useful. He said, not unkindly, 'you seem like someone who'd enjoy being told they're special.' And I sat with that for longer than I'd like to admit, because there's a version of him that's right, and a version of him that's missed the point entirely, and I still haven't

Last weekend I did something stupid and a little brave: I walked around my flat and counted everything I'd started and not finished. The half-knitted scarf. Three notebooks, each with about nine pages of a different "this is the one" idea. A ukulele I can play exactly one and a half songs on. A language app that still thinks I'm a committed beginner in two languages. A box of watercolours with two squares used. I got to nineteen before I stopped, because nineteen already felt like a verdict. For about a day I sat in the obvious story, the one everyone hands us. Flaky. Can't commit. All spark, no follow-through. I've heard it from a manager, an ex, and my own head at 2am, so I know the script by heart. And there's a grain of truth in it I'm not going to pretend away — some of those projects died because the boring middle bit arrived and I just… wandered off, the way I always do once a thing stops being new. But then I actually looked at the nineteen things, properly, instead of just feeling bad about them. And they weren't random. The notebooks were all circling the same handful of questions about how people change. The ukulele and the watercolours were both me trying to make something with my hands after a year of staring at screens. The languages were two trips I'd half-planned and still want to take. Laid out together, the "failures" were basically a map of what I actually care about, drawn in the only honest ink there is — what I reach for when nobody's making me. That reframed it for me, and I want to be careful not to make it too tidy, because it isn't. A map is not the same as arriving anywhere. You can't show people a beautiful map of nineteen places you never visited and call it a trip. The scarf is still cold and useless. But I think we mislabel the thing. We call it a commitment problem when a lot of the time it's an appetite problem — we're hungry for the entry point of almost everything, and the entry point is genuinely the most interesting part if you're wired to love beginnings. What's helped, a bit, is being ruthless about the difference between the projects that are research and the ones that are actually meant to be finished. The notebooks can stay unfinished forever; they were never going to be a book, they were me thinking. But the scarf was a gift for someone, so the scarf has a deadline now and lives by the door where it annoys me. I'm trying to stop treating every started thing as a moral debt and start asking which three actually have a person or a date at the end of them. The other sixteen are allowed to just be evidence that I'm curious and alive. I haven't solved it. I started writing this post twice and abandoned the first version, which I only noticed halfway through, which is so on-brand it's almost funny. So I'll throw it to you. When you look at your own pile of unfinished things, does it read as failure or as a map of what you love? Has anyone found a way to actually finish the few that matter without killing the part of you that needs to keep starting new things? And for the types who finish everything they begin — does an unfinished project genuinely bother you, or is that just a story we tell ourselves about you?

Every few weeks someone new turns up here and the first thing I want to ask is the slightly nosy question: so what are you? Not in a box-you-in way. It's just that knowing someone's four letters changes the conversation a little, in a good way, the way knowing someone's from the same hometown does. If you've never actually taken the test, or you took some random one years ago and can't remember the result, we have our own. You can run it straight through the bot here: — about ten minutes, it asks you the questions, and it hands you a type at the end. Answer as the person you actually are on a normal day, not the one you'd like to be in meetings, or you'll get a flattering result that recognises you less. Then come back and drop it in this thread. I'm honestly more interested in the misses than the hits. The bits where you read your type and thought no, that's not me at all are usually where the good conversation is. So: what did you get? Did it fit, or did it get something badly wrong? And if you've taken the test before, did your type ever change over the years, or has it stubbornly stayed the same?

I ran a small volunteer thing last year, badly organised, no budget, the kind of project that should have died in week two. It didn't, and for a long time I couldn't work out why. We had no proper plan, half the people had never met before, and I kept losing the spreadsheet. By every sensible measure it should have fallen apart. Then someone told me, half as a compliment and half as a complaint, that I'd talked five different people into believing they were the perfect person for jobs they'd never have volunteered for. I hadn't planned it. I'd just looked at each of them and genuinely seen the thing they were good at, and said so, out loud, probably more than once. One of them sticks with me. A quiet guy who'd signed up to "help with whatever," clearly expecting to stack chairs. Within a week he was running the whole logistics side, because I'd noticed in passing that he was the only person who actually remembered what we'd agreed in the last meeting, and I told him that made him the one person we couldn't lose. He looked genuinely surprised. Not falsely modest, surprised. Like nobody had ever framed his careful, unflashy brain as a strength before. That's the ENFP strength I never see on the strengths lists. Not the brainstorming, not the enthusiasm, though we have plenty of both and they get all the attention. It's that we tend to see people a size larger than they see themselves, and we say it out loud before we've thought about whether it's awkward. Half the time the person had no idea anyone noticed. And it isn't flattery, which is the part that matters; flattery is telling people what they want to hear, and this is closer to the opposite. It's telling people something true about themselves that they've been too close to see. I think it comes from the same place as the restlessness. We're scanning constantly, picking up on potential everywhere, and people are just the most interesting version of that. Where someone else sees a colleague who's a bit shy in meetings, we see a person who's three encouragements away from being brilliant in the room. We can't really help saying it. It's not a technique we learned; it's how the people in front of us actually look to us. The flip side is real, of course, and I'd be lying if I made this all sound like a gift. The same project had about four genuinely good ideas I never finished, because the moment they stopped being exciting and turned into ordinary work, my attention quietly wandered off to the next thing. And I burned out a bit by the end, because seeing everyone so clearly also meant absorbing all of it, every worry and bad mood, as if it were mine to carry and fix. So I'm not romanticising it. But the seeing-people thing still feels like the actual superpower, the one I'd least want to trade away. The trick, I think, is learning to do it without quietly setting yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm. I'm still working that part out. So I'm curious how it lands for the rest of you. What's the ENFP strength you'd defend even on a bad day, the one that survives the burnout and the half-finished projects? Has anyone ever named a strength in you that you hadn't noticed in yourself until they said it? And for the non-ENFPs reading along, does this read as a genuine gift, or does being seen that clearly sometimes feel like a lot?

What strikes me, reading something like this in the evening, is how strange it is to find yourself in a taxonomy — to be named, categorised, held still on a page — when the actual experience of being yourself feels so much more like weather than architecture. I came to this late, at forty-three, and I'm not sure I have language for what that timing does to a person.