Which Season Are You?
If you were a season, which one would you be?
If I were a season, I would most likely be spring. And not just because my birthday is sometimes on the first day of spring. There’s something about the winter-cold world waking up to the warmth of summer that I find refreshing, reinvigorating, inspiring. But spring, just like my personality, starts out turbulent, a fury of winds and rain, the dramatic clash of sun and snow.
Vaguely philosophical spiel aside, now would be a good time to admit that I had a lot of trouble coming up with a topic for today’s post. Or at least, I had a lot of trouble getting started on coming up with a topic.
This is something I struggle with on a continual process. Procrastination — it’s like the framework knitting my personality together. Got any big projects or papers due? Finish ’em the night before the deadline. Need to call the financial aid office to make sure I’m not going to be broke during the semester? Put it off until I literally cave under the anxiety of what might happen if I don’t call. Dealing with heavy emotions like anxiety? Hide them from others, ruminate on them until they’ve been picked to pieces.
(Being an INFP sucks sometimes.)
People take personality tests all the time. I’m one of the outliers, one of the extreme personality test junkies who retook the MBTI test over and over again just to affirm my beliefs about myself and who I was. But how accurate are most of these tests? You go to Buzzfeed and you click on the first quiz that catches your eyes, What Kind Of Penguin Are You? You get an Adélie penguin. Sweet, you think. Adélies are little punks. They’re also very curious. You close the BuzzFeed tab and return to your YouTube tab where a pastry baking video is playing, only half conscious of the fact that you have just added on to your personality a new facet, a new angle of your identity. Because now whenever you make a decision, i.e., what socks you’re going to wear on Friday, you’re gonna choose whatever an Adélie penguin would wear (the neon fish-print ones). Then you’ll show up to class and start talking and acting like an Adélie, and then you’ll throw a desk over and get suspended for a week.
Fortunately, I wasn’t as extreme as the above example. But if you were like me, you would hold on to that new facet of character you “discovered” and make it the whole locus of your identity. Some quiz told you you were a quiet person? Better shut up and never say anything to anyone. Got a result that said you were detail oriented and not very in tune with emotions? Better stick to that description to a T and let Susan know that you’re not very comfortable listening to her personal life story.
Narcissus looked at himself in the water until he wasted away. The danger of personality tests is that sometimes they can act as these cracked or damaged mirrors that reflect our real-life qualities in ways that may deceive us or lead us to become imbalanced versions of ourselves, clinging to stereotypical behaviors in order to feel right.
The best personality test might actually be…wait for it…time.
Yes, time. That incessant ticking away of the years that lets you know that life isn’t eternal. People stay more or less the same during the stages of life, but if they mature emotionally and physically at a normal rate, who they are at 50 is obviously gonna be very different from who they were at 20.
Could it be that you’re born a certain way, with certain personality traits, and that you just discover more and more of yourself as you grow older and get more life experience? Or can people actually change their personalities over time? Or…(I’m gonna say it)…do people have multiple personalities for multiple scenarios?
Jill Suttie’s article Can Your Personality Change Over Your Lifetime? is full of these questions, as well as the realization that “thinking of personality as fixed could lead us to feel like we can never grow, or to dismiss people with certain qualities we don’t like, concerned that change isn’t possible when that’s not the case”.
Personality has its roots, but the branches can always grow in different directions (or be cut off or damaged or burned). If time defines your personality and how you handle situations and decisions and outcomes, then seasons of life bring out different parts of you. From the spring of childhood and young adulthood through to the summer of adulthood, to the autumn of the middle years and finally to an elderly winter, it’s almost impossible to remain exactly the same as you were when you were born.
I’ll always be an early spring baby in heart, the torrential downpour of gusty emotions just below the surface of sun and blooming flowers and warmth. Summer is coming soon, but I am still facing the showers of late spring as well as the moodiness and June gloom of one’s early twenties.
So I guess the question I asked earlier might be better worded like this: “Which season are you right now, and why?”
