The Case for Multiple Personalities
This is a post of follow up thoughts to my previous post on “When You Don’t Have One True Calling — Being a Polymath in a Highly Specialized Society”.
“I am an ENFJ” (or one of the other 15 variations of the four-lettered Myers-Briggs classification), people would often tell me before going on to explain what to expect of their behaviors. Sometimes they would go on to guess mine, which makes me cringe a bit. Prior to the popularity of Myers-Briggs personality tests, many other internet quizzes of sorts were in abundance from identifying the temperaments of your personality to the type of leadership style you have, to something as basic as identifying whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, or even astrology signs. Unlike others, I would often cringe at these types of classifications. In my teenage years, I took these types of tests in abundance, mainly to understand myself better. What I soon realized was that these tests did little to help with that, but rather made me more confused than ever. The popular Myers-Briggs personality test was no exception. After taking the test more than a dozen times, I have gotten every single combination of results at least once. I used to jokingly tell people that I have multiple personalities and I’m not sure when any of the personalities will take over. The truth is, conforming to a label feels like we are boxing ourselves in, restricting ourselves from any kind of change beyond certain boundaries. It tells me that I must be a certain way and people expect certain things out of me once they put a label on me. “I thought you were an INFJ, I didn’t expect you to do that”. I would occasionally hear some variation of that from one person to another. The truth is, people are complex, and we are very much situation-based. A variety of factors such as our mood, current energy level, recent events, etc. all affect how we act on a daily basis. To bucketize someone’s behavior and expect the same outcome day after day for an extended period of time, regardless of what changes took place in the person’s life seems irrational, but we all do it in order to make sense of our world. Overtime, I would argue that being aware of these buckets also restricts our actions. In some sense, it’s similar to accepting your weaknesses (I’m not a writer, why am I writing?) instead of changing them. In this case, accepting that you are a certain way instead of seeking out other ways that may be suitable for your life at a particular time. The truth is, sometimes I’m introverted (socializing drains me), other times I’m extroverted (interacting with people energizes me more), sometimes I’m extremely organized, other times I’m very messy. Sometimes I’m highly logical, other times I’m very emotional. Sometimes I’m highly scientific, other times I’m more creative and artistic. Sometimes I’m highly focused, other times I’m extremely distracted. I’m sure all of you are as well to a certain extent. To bucketize me is to eliminate half of myself, and I feel like most people have limited half of their potentials this way.
Categorizations are unavoidable. Oftentimes it is also how our worlds work. We organize information into neat piles in order to understand them. However, when it comes to people, these categorizations also make me highly uncomfortable. Sometimes I wonder why so many people conform to groups and settings instead of freely allowing themselves to be.
“In truth, we are all fast and slow, strong and weak, motivated and lazy in a thousand tiny ways throughout our days that the generalizations simply don’t capture.”
- Douglas Stone
