Michael Sheridan – Personality

“I was reading about MBTI yesterday”, I tell my wife Elizabeth.  MBTI is the Meters-Briggs Type Indicator, a system for sorting personality types.

“I had thought the INTP type was a good match”, I continued, “but I listened to something you’d said before, and I flipped the N to S.  ISTP is a much better match.  Much more grounded in the present.”

I’m not actually sure if she’s listening, but then she says, “I don’t remember us ever talking about that”. She doesn’t look away from her phone.

“Anyhow”, I say, not wasting the rare opportunity to continue talking. “I read the description and it’s a much better fit, but then I tried an experiment to be sure.”

For the first time she looks up briefly from her phone. 

I continue, “I did a search for MBTI ISTP fiction.  It returned a very interesting list of characters that I felt I could relate to.  But as I looked at it I thought, there really are a lot of assassins here.”

“I’m doing mine now”, Elizabeth says.  I’m unaccustomed to her engaging that strongly with anything I talk about, but I wait. 

—-

At this point I am going to digress.  I told this story to Elizabeth’s mother, only, Mom wanted to know who the assassins on the list were. 

“Arya Stark, Katniss Everdeen, James Bond, John Wick, Dirty Harry, Indiana Jones and more, and the ones who weren’t assassins were survivors”, I told her. 

“But the assassins are all the nice ones,” said Mom. 

—-

So Elizabeth searches MBTI INFJ fiction and shrieks, “No.  I don’t like this.  They’re all Disney princesses.  “

I don’t tell her that my list also includes Shrek.