Merry Christmas once again

I thought about writing some kind of special post for Christmas, but not a single idea came to me after a day at work spent thinking about what subject I might choose that I felt would warrant such a description. In part because, while I am feeling far better, I’m still dealing with a lot of the same feels that my last post was written to help me make sense of. At least, that was one of the reasons for it’s publishing. I was also hoping that it would make me feel better immediately, and it did help in that way a tiny bit but notably less so than writing for this blog has helped me to feel better at other times over the last year since I started it. It did allow me to make sense of things as I said though, in a way that post is like a diagram of my mental state at the time it was written.

Now here I am, exactly one week on from the night which was the catalyst for the whole ordeal that following Sunday. I haven’t seen her since, but I left a note over night for her to find when she opened the shop one morning wishing her a Merry Christmas (not entirely unlike how I left a note just over a year ago for someone else to find I suppose), and in fact today as I think I mentioned she’s turning 27 so in the group chat everyone wished her a happy birthday. She responded saying thanks to everyone, and I had been looking forward to the opportunity for even this most meagre interaction all week so that was nice. It probably sounds like I’m deliberately trying to paint myself as the most pathetic person to ever walk the earth, but I’m not kidding here. I really was looking forward to simply having the opportunity to wish her happy birthday over text and in turn be acknowledged (though only together as a group) in response.

Of course I don’t have to include this information, but believe it or not my last post actually received a comment (something which I wish I got more often, even if they all end up being hostile and insulting) which affirmed my belief that the honesty I try to express in these blog posts is what probably appeals most to people as well as being what defines my writing/ output on wordpress ultimately. I talk about all kinds of things, I talk about my experiences with or thoughts about music, about philosophy, fiction, psychedelic drugs, my job, homeless people, and yes those unfortunate girls who happen to earn my affection, but there is a through-line to it all.

I’ve talked about this before a few times regarding the theme of doubt, which is something which frequently comes up here. Speaking on what purpose this “project”, or whatever you want to call this thing I’m doing, has though, an emotionally honest insight into the experience of a young male is what I’m trying to present. I’ve gone back and forth on this, sometimes liking the idea and other times cringing at it, but it really does function essentially as journal/ diary that I happen to share with strangers on the internet. Of course the awareness of such a presence (you) changes the writing, changes the structure and the format in various ways both small and large, changes what I might talk about, keeps me motivated to consistently write, etc. Nevertheless, whatever it is I’m doing here is recognisably journal-like.

Now experiences of unrequited love, or at least infatuation I’m really not sure if I feel right referring to any of the experiences of this sort I’ve had over the years as “love”, are something which I think most if not all people in a similar situation to myself will have gone through at least once if not several times. I will admit that for me it’s almost a pathology though, I seem to fall into this situation with a concerning frequency. Oneitis, or whatever term you prefer to use, is a frustrating but inescapable feature of my life. I suppose it’s like the “compulsion to repetition” that Freud talked about, or whatever it’s called. I learned most of what I know about Freud in my psychology A-Level classes back in 2013 so my memory isn’t great and I never finished the first year either, but I think the reference is an apt one in this context.

It’s the right thing to do to include that anecdote at the start is what I’m trying to say, because it is emblematic of the situation at large. I’ve only just read back through that previous post today. as is probably made obvious by the many mistakes and absence of links when referencing older posts, I didn’t even read through it to do any editing the day I uploaded it. And I noticed when reading it back to myself today that I mentioned the recognition I feel when interacting with her which I’m glad I did because it is a large part of why I have developed the feelings I have. There are so few people who I’ve met who can consistently make me feel that way, who I feel more real after interacting with than less. Most conversations I have with people have always seemed off, like we’re kind of talking past one another.

It’s quite difficult for me to explain what is different with these few people, or even what the issue I’ve always had with most normal people is, I’m really struggling to put it into words. I probably use this word way too much, but it’s like there’s a certain resonance. When I find someone like this, it’s like when you’re fiddling with a radio dial and getting nothing but static and then you finally find a station. It’s not even necessarily the case that these people are anything like me, if you were to say look at their interests or personality type or anything like that then in several cases (though in total there are only a handful of people like this I’ve found, new oneitis of course, my only two current friends who I’ve talked about a few times, an Egyptian guy I knew when I was 17/ 18, and a guy in my chemistry class when I was 16, and maybe one or two others I can’t remember right now) you would find they are quite different from me.

In turn there are many people who share several interests with me (both superficial and more meaningful ones), who have a personality more like my own, who come from a more similar background, who may even share in the same difficulties I’ve always had, and yet I just don’t have this connection with them. In the abstract I might, in that last post I talked about the author/ poet Fernando Pessoa who is a figure that I very much relate with, yet there’s no reason to assume that if I were to have been able to meet him, or someone very similar, we would get along. I guess the only way I can explain it is to refer to the whole “bee urself” meme, because that’s what I’m able to do around them in a sense while being unable to around anyone else. That is my demeanour, how I carry myself, how I respond to things I find funny or sad or annoying, how I speak and move, around these few people is far closer to how I am when I’m at home and truly relaxed than how I am around most other people.

What is noteworthy is that new oneitis is the first female who I’ve met who is able to put me at ease in this way. Every other person like this that I’ve described, though they are few in number, has been male. I’m hoping there might be more people like this, I guess I’ll have to just wait and see, but for now she is the outlier. Until her, the one unifying factor I could think of to help me try and figure out how to find more people like this was that they were all male. After all I am generally even more awkward around women than men, and this whole phenomenon I’m talking about is a post-puberty one. Now that doesn’t mean that the two things were exactly aligned or even connected literally, but around a similar time period but possibly slightly before beginning puberty I went through a fairly significant personality change.

I started secondary school and for the first year I had two pretty good friends with whom I would regularly get into trouble for acting silly in class, getting into little fights with, the typical mischief you can expect from a 11 year old boy. I became very well known rather quickly for being a class clown kind of character, and not just in my class but across the whole year group because I was so frequently sent on “time out” to other classrooms. At the end of that year I was sent to a behavioural correction unit for the last quarter of that year, and then the first quarter of the second year. When I got back, I was kept separate from those two friends and moved into a new class with people who knew me by reputation but I didn’t know at all for the most part. This was the point in my life where things changed quite drastically, I became the shy/ nervous individual I really still am to this day.

I went from someone who got excited when we were told we would have to make a presentation in front of the whole class (I remember giving a presentation on Roman occupied Britain in that first year and really enjoying it), to someone who began to feel dread when told to prepare to do one, within a period of about a year. I did find new friends in time, but they were very different kinds of people. The nerds, the other awkward kids who spent lunch break in the library away from everyone else. And I didn’t really feel that comfortable around them anyway, by this time I had become the person I am today in a way. This was really the year where I first felt truly out of place, or at least this is the year where the process of becoming that loner/ weirdo character I had always felt a strange kinship with despite not being similar to actually started.

I spent a lot of time struggling with this, but then towards the end of the third year I met the first person of this new type I started this entry off trying to describe. In his case, not only did he have this ability to put me at ease and allow me to bee myself around him but we actually did share many interests and ideas, and also the same problems with awkwardness and loneliness. The two of us were very close for a time, and eventually we brought in that third friend and those two are now the only friends in the world I really have left. At least irl, for the time being, of course I’m always hoping things will change. Everyone since then has just been a normie, people that aren’t like me at all I don’t think. Yet they have something, some quality, and I don’t know what it is. It is a most elusive characteristic, if only I could more easily identify it my life might have been much easier.

For all this talk of changing personality though, there is also much which has remained as is. Last Christmas I took the MBTI test for my “Christmas special” post, because I thought it might be something fun for me to go through and for others to read, and I kind of made a mockery of the questions. I said I would write a follow up to that post, but I never did. I forgot about it honestly, and then when I came to write my Addenda post where I responded to many disparate things which I wrote over the entire first year of the blog, I was reminded but for some reasons decided against including a section about it. I guess I have some thoughts now though, which kind of relate to what I’ve been writing about in this post so far, and as I said at the start I don’t have any real ideas for what to do for this post so a response to the last Christmas post is as good an idea as any.

So I was pretty mean in that post, I dissected each question and I think made the test look pretty silly. Yet I don’t actually think the MBTI is entirely without value, I think it’s unscientific and the actual tests they use to find out what category to put you in tend to be terrible, but the general idea of separating people into various personality types makes sense to me. People say things like “oh yeah, so you think there are only 16 different people in the world”, and of course I don’t as that would be ridiculous, but I do believe that we can categorise people by personality type. The most well known site, the one I used last year, is 16personalities.com, and one thing I will say that I like about it is that as well as the wordy/ jargon terms for the different personality (INFP, ENTP, etc.) they also give each type a more normal name.

INFP for example, the result I got last year and also two of the three other times I’ve taken similar tests in the past, is also referred to as the mediator. Interestingly last year when I took the test they called that type the dreamer, which I think I prefer and certainly feel is a better description of myself than “mediator”. The one time I got a different result I believe I was given INTP, which they give the cutesy nickname of the logician, and I can see it to an extent but I actually do have to say that when reading the descriptions for all sixteen types (you can find them on the 16personalities site if you’re interested) the INFP one does seem to fit me more so than any other. The funny thing being that I didn’t actually get that result every time, and that at least last time when they showed me my results for the test I was very close to getting almost the complete opposite result for three out of the four metrics they use to figure out which of the 16 types you fit into.

There’s also a fifth measure used only by the 16personalites site, at the end separated by a dash. Turbulent or Assertive, which I didn’t really read much about but it seems to me that turbulence is being used as a placeholder for neuroticism. Honestly though I would just drop the whole scientific façade entirely, and instead simply present the 16 types without the silly letters and just ask people to self identify. I feel like I got a much better understanding of which of the types I am most like by reading all 16 descriptions than by taking the stupid test. The test if anything, because of it’s many faults, almost led me away from the type which most describes my own personality. I say most as well, rather than simply saying it does describe me, because of course no one fits neatly into any one category.

If you read through these descriptions then you’ll find that a fair few could be said to describe you reasonably well, the idea being that only with one do you have that “omg literally me!” reaction. It doesn’t help that they describe each type in a very romantic fashion, every type is unique and only a small percentage of the population and so on. It’s a little nauseating to be honest, and in fact these cloying descriptions given for each type are part of the reason that I have had this gut reaction of distrust for this site and the other MBTI online tests I’ve taken in the past. Another reason is that they often give examples of people who you know never took the test (because some of them are hundreds of years old or fictional) for each type, Tolkien and Frodo Baggins are both given as examples of INFPs for example.

Now I have this understanding that the types function more as modern archetypes than some scientific categorisation (in fact I believe the people who originally developed the MBTI model were influenced by Carl Jung) however, I understand how they were able to decide upon these examples. Indeed the method for how they identified these old writers, politicians, historical figures and fictional characters is probably more effective than the tests we use to find out for ourselves which of the 16 types we might be most like. People aren’t stupid, but these tests tend to be, I say just let people self identify. I’m not sure what the value in the tests actually is, they seem kind of silly in fact as I think I demonstrated fairly well last Christmas. Now to try and tie the two disparate threads of this post together, I’m going to talk about a line from the INFP description page from the 16personalities site.

Comprising just 4% of the population, the risk of feeling misunderstood is unfortunately high for the Mediator personality type – but when they find like-minded people to spend their time with, the harmony they feel will be a fountain of joy and inspiration.

It seems to be referring to the exact phenomenon I was talking about before, which is rather interesting. Yet that one term “like-minded”, doesn’t seem to fit. Because as I explained most of the people who I’ve been able to have this connection with were not like me. Or maybe they were, maybe they were also of a similar if not the same personality type. Which is something different from character, Character and Personality are two very different things. To explain, Character is like a raiment, it’s clothing. Character is entirely individual and you wouldn’t be able to categorise types of character like I believe you can with personality. It is your foibles and the baggage you pick up over the years, the wounds and the victories, it’s the art you find most important, your aesthetic sense. It is the outermost aspect of who you are, what people first encounter.

Personality is different, I believe that if you could go back in time one hundred years, or even one thousand, you would still find that when you scratched away the historical and individual baggage you would find people who are entirely recognisable. You won’t find anyone who loves Marvel movies or Steven King novels in the 1400s, but you will find these same archetypes. And while I’m not sure if 16 is the perfect number, perhaps you could break it down into 40 personality types, or maybe 16 is too much, I think it might just be serviceable. And I guess below the personality maybe there’s a soul, if you believe in the idea I’m not sure if I do or not. That’s a whole separate subject for a whole different post (or several), so for now I will avoid the issue.

So the question is, if you wipe away the superficial character stuff and try and see where these people I’ve known would fall on the MBTI (which isn’t perfect as I will repeat, but seems better than any alternative I’ve seen thus far), would they INFP like myself? Or at the very least, does the INFP description fit them even a little even if another fits them even more accurately? Well it’s hard to say, because most of them I didn’t get to know very well. Indeed one of the things that frustrates me quite a lot is that I feel like I’m being kept apart from new oneitis. I spoke about that a little in the last post, and it’s true. Even though she’s the only person so far at this job (male or female) who I felt rather comfortable in the presence of almost immediately after being introduced.

I actually remember the very first time I saw her, I put my hand out to shake hers with no nervousness at all. Everyone else at this job I had an awkward first greeting with, other than her. I remember shaking her hand and her smiling and being completely taken aback by how easy it was, when I had been dreading the interaction all morning. After all as I said, first greetings for me almost always go rather awkwardly even with other people mentioned in this grouping I’m talking about today. I know it sounds like I’m totally pedestalising this girl, and I’m not saying she’s this perfect goddess or anything if that’s the impression you’re getting. She’s just a normal person, actually most of her interests don’t really interest me and she’s far from a “dream partner” or whatever.

All I’m trying to express with this post, regarding her anyway as I’m also talking about other things, is that while she may be just a normal person I’m not. Yet I feel normal when talking to her. That’s really it, I just don’t feel like an awkward fucking freak around her and it’s refreshing. Even around the other girls who I’ve referred to as oneitis I didn’t have that, I didn’t really enjoy being in their company. As I’ve talked about in some depth, I think I was just lonely and therefore I unconsciously would have turned anyone into a “oneitis” type figure who I met and fit the very basic criteria, which just so happened to be those other girls I started working with. Of course there’s very likely still an element of that at play here as well, but I do genuinely like this one as a person.

There’s this one anecdote with her in fact that I didn’t end up mentioning last week for some reason but is one that I can’t help but keep returning to in my mind. When we finish a shift where I work we have to write down how much money we made, and we bring up a report on the till screen to show this. Now it shows two figures, the number of customers that we met that day and the amount of money we made. Almost every time I’m switching over with someone it comes up as part of the usual smalltalk conversation, and while everyone else always unthinkingly mentions the amount of money made when I ask how things went, when she first started she would always mention the amount of people.

It’s just interesting because I did the same thing, whenever someone would ask how busy it had been or how well I’d done that day I would assume they meant how many people had been in the shop and answer in that fashion. After a time I noticed that everyone else answered with the figure made, and so eventually I just started thinking in that way, and she seems to have done so as well. In fact we joked about it a few months ago, though if she were to ever see this and realise how much thought I’ve given to it I’m sure she’d think I’m a total weirdo. And does it mean anything? I don’t know, honestly. It feels significant to me, like it shows a certain innocence or naivety which would be characteristic of a dreamer/ mediator type I think is fair to say, but maybe there’s no significance. I do tend to read significance into almost everything, especially silly little things like this, which I suppose is itself also fitting for this personality type.

I don’t know, and I’m not really sure I have anything else to say about this. I think for a post that I started writing with no plan whatsoever this has turned out rather well as it is, and so here is a good place to stop. I feel like maybe there’s more I could say, a few things I could have elaborated on, but I’m tired and I want this post to actually be out on Christmas and I won’t be able to write at all tomorrow until late at night because I’ll be spending the day with my dad. Maybe I’ll elaborate more on some of this stuff when I do a second Addenda post later next year, or maybe I’ll even leave it until next Christmas and talking about personality will become a kind of odd yearly tradition. Only time will tell, I don’t really have a plan. I hope you’re having a lovely Christmas, wherever you may be, and to see you in the next post.