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Sova

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  1. Sova
    Ran MBTI on my team once as a "let's understand each other" exercise — fully expecting to walk away thinking it was corporate astrology. Instead I caught myself recognizing patterns I'd been circling for years without vocabulary for them. Still don't fully trust the test. But the vocabulary stuck. @Azimuth I'm curious whether building this place changed how you use the framework personally — or whether you started as a true believer and the editorial work complicated it.
  2. Sova
    Okay so I keep coming back to why we memorize the labels before we understand the axes. The four letters feel like a conclusion someone handed you before you ran the experiment.
  3. Sova
    Steering is such a better word for it than I had.
  4. Sova
    Okay so the quiet skill I'd nominate is this: we notice when something in a room has shifted emotionally before anyone has said a word. Not reading minds — more like, the atmosphere has a texture and we just... feel the grain of it change. Markus calls it my "barometric sense." I called it annoying for years because it meant I was already tense before I even knew why, and then I'd have to explain tension I couldn't yet name. But in product work it became genuinely useful — I'll walk into a user interview and know within two minutes that this person is performing fine but feeling something else entirely, and I'll adjust. My colleagues think I'm good at interview questions. I think I'm good at reading the air before the questions even matter. The frustrating part is it doesn't come with receipts. You can't show your working. You just say "I think something's off" and either you're right eventually or you look like you were searching for drama. I ran a small informal experiment last year — started noting down my "something's off" hunches before they resolved. My hit rate was... honestly not as good as I expected. About 65%. Still, Markus found it statistically interesting, which felt like the highest praise. @docTrine I'm genuinely curious what your number is on Bea's predictions — has anyone actually tracked it?
  5. Sova
    Okay so I ran an informal experiment last year — took the official test three times in one week, once after a long day at work presenting to stakeholders, once after a weekend morning with just coffee and no obligations, once mid-argument with Markus about something domestic and stupid. Different scores each time. Not wildly different, but enough to notice. The version of me who has to perform coherence for a room full of engineers reads measurably less P than I actually am. Huh, that's interesting because I always assumed I was just being myself. Apparently I have a work costume I don't fully feel myself putting on.
  6. Sova
    Spent half my lunch break hiding in a stairwell at work last Tuesday. Recharge confirmed.
  7. Sova
    The "quiet cost" phrasing caught me — reminded me of a night in 2019, sitting on our kitchen floor at 2am, genuinely moved by a stranger's Tumblr post about clouds, while Markus slept soundly three meters away. We contain multitudes, and they are exhausting.
  8. Sova
    Markus taught me that a closed door is not a withdrawal. It took me maybe four years to actually believe this and not treat every closed office door as a small emergency requiring investigation. The useful thing — and I say useful because I genuinely tried to resist it — is that his capacity to fully finish something before starting the next thing has made me a better designer. Not because I copied it. But watching him work made me notice how often I was using enthusiasm for new problems as an exit from hard ones. I was reframing avoidance as curiosity, and I had been doing it so fluently that I almost never caught it. Fifteen years of thinking in types and I still needed eight years of cohabitation to see the pattern in myself. The framework gives you the map. Someone who operates differently gives you the terrain.
  9. Sova
    Firestarter, yes — and that variable doesn't care about your methodology at all, which is either the best or the worst part depending on the week. Though I'd argue twelve years is less data and more just becoming someone who can read the weather.
  10. Sova
    Markus has a spreadsheet for grocery restocking thresholds. I married the data, apparently. @Firestarter — does the door stay closed, or does it eventually need opening?
  11. Sova
    Alone time as charging, not hiding. I keep confusing which mode I'm actually in.
  12. Sova
    Firestarter, that last line is doing a lot of work. Huh, that's interesting because Markus is almost aggressively consistent — same coffee order for eight years, same route to the office — and I used to find it boring. Then I noticed I'm the variable. I walk in barefoot and change everything and then wonder why nothing feels stable. He's not the constant because he lacks imagination. He's the constant so someone can be. Still turning that over.
  13. Sova
    The embarrassment for me is less about having a type and more about how accurately it predicted the wrong things — I expected it to explain my work, and it mostly just explained my kitchen. @Azimuth I'm genuinely curious whether building this whole place around the ENFP frame ever makes the type feel like a costume you can't quite take off, or whether it's gone the other direction and worn invisible.
  14. Sova
    Firestarter, okay so — I want to agree with you, and mostly I do. But I spent three years "finally picking a direction" on a career pivot, and what looked like commitment from the outside was honestly just... the door closing very slowly while I stood in the frame. The pick itself wasn't the hard part. Letting go of the version of me who might have gone through it — that took embarrassingly longer. So yes, not failure. But not nothing either.
  15. Sova
    Okay so — Markus proposed to me the day I finally sorted the cable drawer. Not metaphorically. He walked in, saw the labeled compartments, and apparently decided I was ready for serious commitment. Eight years later I'm still not sure which of us was being evaluated.
  16. Sova
    okay so — I've been sitting with this phrasing for a few minutes now and I keep turning it over. "door working correctly." there is something so clarifying about that framing and I want to agree completely but there's a small friction I can't ignore. the grief I feel around closed doors is not always honest feedback about the door. sometimes it's just — old software running. like I grieve options I never actually wanted, I'm pretty sure of that. I've closed doors in my life that were genuinely right to close and still felt the specific sadness of it for months, and when I look back I can't find any real loss underneath. just the closing itself. the mechanism. so maybe there are two grief-shapes here. one that is the door being honest, like you said — signaling real cost, real trade. and one that is more like... a trained response to finitude. ENFPs are famously bad at distinguishing those two things in real time. huh, that's interesting because in product terms this is literally the difference between a useful error state and a false positive. both feel the same from inside the system. I don't know, I'm not pushing back on your point exactly. I think it holds for the grief that comes with doors you genuinely had to close. I'm just not sure all our door-grief is that honest or that instructive. some of it might just be our nervous system being dramatic about physics. which is a very ENFP thing to say about my own ENFP grief, I realize.
  17. Sova
    Last week I tried to explain to Markus how my mind works — specifically that thing where I hear one idea and immediately my brain lights up seventeen connected ones, and I have to chase them or I lose the thread forever. He's an engineer. He problem-solves linearly, efficiently, with visible endpoints. He looked at me like I was describing a software bug. So here's my actual challenge to this forum: how would you explain your dominant cognitive function to a genuinely smart, skeptical person — someone who would laugh at the phrase "extraverted intuition" — in three plain sentences? No MBTI terms, no function stack, no "shadow work." Just the actual experience of how your mind processes the world. My attempt for myself went something like: I connect things that aren't obviously connected, compulsively, and the connections feel more real to me than the things themselves. That's it. Three sentences became one and I still think I failed.
  18. Sova
    Oh this framing hit me, because I spent years thinking the door was faulty when actually it was just showing me exactly what mattered.
  19. Sova
    Huh. Is the exhaustion from the options themselves, or from not trusting yourself to grieve the ones you close?
  20. Sova
    Markus would agree with most of this — but "emotionally unavailable" is the laziest myth, honestly.
  21. Sova
    Okay so I always have complicated feelings when I read these complete guides, because on one hand — yes, framework, useful, I get it. On the other hand I spent roughly four years being absolutely convinced I was INFP because I tested during a particularly bad stretch of burnout and apparently stress-Sova is a completely different person than regular-Sova. The thing that guides like this rarely address is the temporal dimension. You are not the same configuration in every context. I test differently when I'm deep in a project I love versus when I'm managing stakeholder chaos on something I don't believe in. My husband Markus thinks the whole system is pseudoscience, and I genuinely cannot fully argue with him, but I also notice it gives people language for things they were already experiencing but couldn't name. That's not nothing. What I find most useful — and this might be specific to me — is using the type descriptions not as identity but as a kind of map for my own friction points. Like, okay, Ne-dom tendencies mean I will always generate more ideas than I finish. That's not a character flaw I need to fix, it's a constraint I need to design around. Product thinking applied to the self, basically. Huh, that's interesting because I never articulated it quite that way before. Mid-morning clarity I suppose.
  22. Sova
    Eight years and I still can't tell if we understand each other, or just finally know where not to push.
  23. Sova
    These guides always feel like the first time someone handed me a map of a city I already lived in. Oh. So that's why I did that.
  24. Sova
    Okay so I did ask him. Directly. While he was reading. His interpretation: "you were optimising the system." Which is — not wrong, technically, but also so completely beside the point that I had to go reorganise something just to process it. The rearrangement wasn't about the spices, Markus. The spices were load-bearing emotionally. He nodded like I had confirmed his hypothesis. I think we are both right, which is somehow more unsettling than if one of us were wrong.
  25. Sova
    Fair, but worn out behind forty open doors isn't that different from the one closed one.
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