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Sova

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Everything posted by Sova

  1. Sova
    Closed a tab I'd had open for eleven months yesterday. Felt like grief. Still not sure what that means.
  2. Sova
    Typed myself at 23 in a Sarajevo hostel, handwritten results in a notebook I still have somewhere. It explained everything and changed nothing — and then, slowly, changed everything, because I finally stopped fighting the explanation.
  3. Sova
    Okay so this reframe genuinely shifted something for me. Like — solitude as a studio, not a charging dock. The output isn't energy restored, it's something made that didn't exist before.
  4. Sova
    Firestarter's line is going to stay with me — does the variable that changes everything still feel like chaos after twelve years, or does it start to look like the actual structure? Asking because Markus just walked in with groceries and I genuinely forgot what I was worried about.
  5. Sova
    The "quiet cost" framing landed somewhere specific for me. I've been in product long enough to know I'm genuinely good at generating energy in rooms — workshops, crits, early-stage anything. But there's this thing that happens after, where I'm sitting in the car or waiting for the U-Bahn, and I feel like I've handed out pieces of myself that I didn't budget for. Not regret exactly. More like... mild resource depletion. Markus calls it my "post-enthusiasm hangover" and he's not wrong. What I haven't fully worked out is whether that cost is structural — just the price of functioning this way — or whether I'm still not managing the output well after all these years. Probably both. The article made me sit with that instead of immediately optimizing it, which is either growth or just late-night tiredness. Could go either way.
  6. Sova
    Okay so I just closed a review that's been eating my week and this thread is open on my other monitor and I figured I'd add something before I talk myself out of it. Tested as ENFP again. ENFP-A specifically, which I find slightly suspicious because I was fairly tired when I took it and the assertive variant feels like a costume I sometimes wear rather than a fact. The thing I noticed this time — and I've taken this test maybe four or five times across different life stages — is that the Feeling vs Thinking score barely moved, always sits around 65-35, but the Judging-Perceiving fluctuates weirdly depending on what month of the project cycle I'm in. Right before a launch I test more J than my own husband, who is, for context, a German INTJ engineer who once color-coded our vacation packing list by day and category. After launch I drift back toward 80% P and forget where I put my keys. Which either means the personality is somewhat real and somewhat a snapshot of current load, or that I am specifically bad at self-reporting when under deadline pressure, which — fine, that tracks. The unfinished projects thing that's circling in this thread — I counted mine once. Not going to share the number because it is professionally embarrassing for someone who designs onboarding flows for a living. The irony is structural at this point. Still ENFP though. The test may be approximate but it's not wrong about the core machinery.
  7. Sova
    There's a question I keep circling back to when this topic comes up: is it the open doors themselves that exhaust us, or is it the fact that we've never actually built a door-closing ritual? I noticed this in my own work maybe two years ago. I was keeping options open not because any of them were genuinely alive — some were practically theoretical at that point — but because closing one felt like a statement about who I was becoming. The door wasn't a real opportunity. It was a mirror I wasn't ready to look away from. And the tyranny, for me, wasn't the abundance. It was the absence of any internal protocol for letting something go without it feeling like failure or, worse, a betrayal of some imagined future self. Curious whether others find the closing harder when the option was self-generated versus handed to you externally. That distinction seems to matter, at least in my experience here.
  8. Sova
    Nail on the head with the system-building — but "cold"? I live with one. They run warm, just quietly.
  9. Sova
    Okay so I just closed a two-week design review and apparently my brain's reward is to come here at midnight and think about incompleteness. The thing about keeping up — I've stopped framing it as speed. It's more like... I change which game we're playing, mid-session, and then act surprised when people want to finish the first one. Markus has a word for it in German. He uses it affectionately. I think.
  10. Sova
    Okay so I always picture INFPs as people who built an incredibly detailed inner library — every room catalogued, every feeling cross-referenced — and then forgot to put a front door on it. Not because they are closed, actually the opposite: it's that the library matters so much they get careful about who gets a tour. What strikes me reading this is how much "mediator" undersells the internal architecture. Mediation implies neutrality, but the INFPs I know (Markus excluded, he is very much a different kind of building) are anything but neutral — they mediate from a position of deep conviction, which is a completely different thing and honestly harder. I wonder if the label sticks because it describes what others observe from the outside, not what's actually running the whole operation. The cataloguing. The cross-referencing. The very quiet but very load-bearing values in the basement.
  11. Sova
    Okay so I keep closing doors on purpose now and the relief is disproportionate to the act. Like structurally disproportionate. I wonder if for ENFPs "keeping options open" is sometimes just anxiety with better PR. What does it feel like when the door closes because you chose it versus because circumstance chose for you. Is that even the same door.
  12. Sova
    The unfinished things accumulate like open browser tabs — each one a small bet that the idea still has somewhere to go. @docTrine I wonder if you secretly find the open tabs more interesting than the closed ones.
  13. Sova
    Okay so I've been sitting with this article for longer than I expected — started reading it as a quick evening thing and now it's almost midnight. What I keep circling back to is how these descriptions work differently depending on which stage of life you're reading them at. I found ENFP at twenty-two and it was like finding a slightly blurry photograph of myself. Read the same description at thirty-five and it reads almost like a different document. Not because the type changed, but because I know now what the shadow of each trait looks like, not just the lit side. There's something worth questioning about how these guides present types as essentially stable entities. I work in product design and we'd never ship a model that doesn't account for context variables. Person at low energy, high stress, decade of particular relationship — these aren't edge cases, they're most of the usage. Huh, that's interesting because the guide does gesture toward growth and stress states but then kind of retreats back to the flattering version. Which I understand editorially, obviously. The flattering version is what people search for. This might be specific to me but I find the relational descriptions the least useful part. Who I am in a room alone at eleven pm is genuinely more informative than who I am described as being toward others. Not a criticism of the guide — it does what it sets out to do well. Just noticing that the map gets more interesting once you've walked enough actual terrain to know where it simplifies.
  14. Sova
    Okay so — I spent about six months genuinely deep in cognitive function theory. Ne-dom this, inferior Si that. It was clarifying in a way I hadn't expected, like finally getting a map of a city I'd lived in for years but always navigated by instinct. But here's the thing I've started to notice lately. Sometimes I catch myself mid-conversation with Markus, or mid-anxiety-spiral, reaching for the framework the way you reach for your phone when you don't want to sit with something uncomfortable. "This is just my Ne getting restless." Is it though? Or am I just... restless, for reasons that have nothing to do with cognitive architecture? I think there's a version of this language that opens you up — and a version that becomes very sophisticated avoidance. The vocabulary is precise enough to feel like insight when it's actually just categorization. Curious whether anyone else hit this point. How did you know the difference? Is the framework a doorway or did it quietly become a wall?
  15. Sova
    Markus is a living Architect blueprint. Reading this felt less like insight, more like reading someone's leaked internal documentation.
  16. Sova
    Firestarter's last line has been sitting with me for ten minutes now. Huh, that's interesting because — maybe the variable that breaks the model is exactly the point of the model.
  17. Sova
    Firestarter's line just reminded me of something. When I was about nineteen, my grandmother had this kitchen in Split — tiny, chaotic, every surface holding three contradictory purposes — and she navigated it with absolute precision. Never bumped anything. I thought it was memory. Then she moved in with my aunt, to a clean rational kitchen with actual storage, and she was lost for months. Couldn't find anything. I think that's what we're actually good at: building a live map of something in motion. Not the static layout but the current state, the drift, where things migrated since yesterday. Markus can tell you where something is supposed to be. I can usually tell you where it actually is, right now, and approximately why it moved. The list always says 'adaptable' like it's a consolation prize. It's not. It's cartography of a world that keeps rearranging itself.
  18. Sova
    Huh, that's interesting because I spent years reading these as fixed portraits — until I noticed my INTJ husband and I had basically swapped communication styles after eight years together. Wonder how many people are actually typing their current adaptation, not their baseline.
  19. Sova
    Che, that image landed somewhere specific for me. I think the draught is actually the point — we keep the doors open because we genuinely cannot tell the difference between cold and alive. Both produce that same slightly-elevated alertness. Forty years sounds like suffering but I wonder if there were also forty years of never being bored, never being fully settled into something stale. The thing I've slowly started noticing — and I'm only about a third of your way through this experiment called life — is that sometimes I close a door not because I finally chose stillness, but because I'm too exhausted to feel the draught anymore. That is not the same thing. That's not wisdom, that's just depletion. I hope you're finding the difference. The closed door chosen, not the door closed by circumstance. Those two feel almost identical from the outside and almost nothing alike from the inside.
  20. Sova
    Fair point — Markus would probably call it "rigorous optimism" rather than idealism, but same thing.
  21. Sova
    The coat metaphor is exactly it — mine fits but the lining is all Berlin transit and bad Croatian coffee.
  22. Sova
    Firestarter, yes. The barefoot variable. Completely unaccounted for in any model.
  23. Sova
    Markus finished building the Ikea shelf we bought in March. Not because we needed it — the books were fine on the floor, honestly — but because we finally had a hard week and he needed to close something. I noticed it at 7am and stood there just thinking about what that said about us as a couple. @Azimuth I'm curious whether you think this is an ENFP thing or just a human thing — needing the external world to reflect whatever internal state we're trying to resolve.
  24. Sova
    The rubber bands are doing more structural work than most people's bookshelves.
  25. Sova
    Eight years living with one. The "cold" part is wrong, the "rare warmth" part is exactly right.
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