So there weren’t any posts in April.  Not one.  Not a Type Angst or a blog update, and certainly not Type Heroes: INTP – The Alchemist, or Group Dynamics: The Avengers, which I said in the Live Q&A I wanted to post in April.  Nope.

Now, until last week, the hundreds of drafts I wrote of this post in my head were all apologies.  “I am sooo sorry I didn’t post the things I said I would!  I am sooo sorry you had to wait!  I am sooo sorry I haven’t responded to everyone!!  I am sooo sorry I suck at life!!!!”  All those drafts were full of excuses too.  “I was organizing my house” (which I was), “I was reorganizing the blog” (which, doesn’t it look lovely?), “There were personal and family issues” (true also, and those happen), “I was having multiple nervous breakdowns” (eh, also true).  But all of those were excuses; not because they weren’t valid and real claims on my time, because they were, but because all of those things were just excuses in my life for me to ignore the real reason I didn’t want to write.

And oh, how pissed I was at myself that I didn’t want to write!  Here I was, at the end of March, coming down from this insane blog high; we had just finished our first Live Q&A, that was amazing!  Everyone was so supportive and loving and awesome about it!  We were finishing up our first wave of Personalized Typings and there were so many of you begging for us to release more (and we haven’t forgotten you!  I just hope you still want them…).  I was getting daily emails from amazing readers gushing about how they’d never read anything quite like aLBoP.  It was humbling and often brought me… well, I was going to say to tears, but I’m more of a can’t-stop-smiling-till-my-face-hurts when I’m touched, type person.  So when everything seemed to be going perfectly, just what I’d always wanted, then why couldn’t I write?  Why would I seek out other activities and “responsibilities” to *avoid* writing?

I could write about all the myriad of possibilities I considered these past two months for what *could* have been the problem, but that would take a long time lol.  It’s amazing how many possibilities with merit an ENTP can come up with in two months.  But, while some of them were useful in their own ways, and I learned a lot about myself this past while, none of them were the root cause behind why I was dreading pulling up Blogger.

The real reason?  I was sick of MBTI culture.

I was sick of clicking #MBTI on Twitter and wanting to throw up.  I was depressed by the way I’d check out the MBTI boards of people who follow me on Pinterest, just to have my skin crawl at what most MBTI pins are like.  Honestly, when people follow my other boards, like Wear It or Decorate It, I usually go check out their boards too; but when they follow A Little Bit of Personality or one of my other Typing boards, lately I’ve been just ignoring it.  And so often that’s not because the individuals who follow me have bad intentions, it’s just because the MBTI pins would just be so oversimplified, so creepily demeaning of other people and what they could be, that I just didn’t want to look at it anymore.  I scroll through articles and images and I think, “If this is the best understanding of humanity that the ‘best and brightest’ of us can give, then I want a refund.”

I am so sick of the *pretension* of MBTI culture.  I hate that when I bring up personality typing with “normal” people, those who haven’t studied this much, they tend to cringe or change the subject because they are so used to those who study psychology, personality typing, and MBTI specifically, being demeaning, condescending and full of hateful enmity toward everyone else.  And beyond being mean, self-aggrandizing and using personality typing as a way to put their own self-worth above that of others, people like that are *wrong!*  Like literally incorrect!  The vast oversimplifications you read online (and in books too) of Extraversion and Introversion being just social habits, or Thinkers being “beings of mere logic,” while Feelers base all their decisions on wishy-washy emotions, aren’t just damaging to the individuals they restrict, they also just don’t hold up in practice under the scrutiny of the scientific method!  They don’t work and aren’t repeatable and verifiable.  It’s those kinds of people that give the real live Dr. Brennans of the world justification in saying that psychology is a soft, pseudoscience where people just make stuff up; because the way those people do it, it is.

As I went into April, I was being ripped into two.  On the one hand, I had you amazing readers who want personality typing as a way to teach you, free you and help you understand people and the boundless potential they have; and on the other hand I had this oppressive blight on mankind, that of people who didn’t want the real version because it would mean they could no longer use personality typing as a method to be better than others without having to work to be better people whatsoever.  Like my INFJ said, there are really only two types of people.  There are people who like people, who want to know whatever is really true and find reality even when it’s painful or uncomfortable.  And then there are the people who want to ignore what reality and true science really say, because they don’t like what reality reveals about them, and therefore find the need to tear others down.

But, I had to realize that my overall picture of humanity on the whole was being skewed by the cross-section visible to me.  The loud, teeth-gnashing, people-hating crowd isn’t in the majority… they’re just really loud.  There are in fact more people who want the real version, who want to hear that people can be more than they’ve been led to believe, that heroes do truly exist and that who *you* are going to be is your choice to make.  Not that your history, environment, your brain or some condescending psychology nut, is going to do that for you.  There are so many people who want the truth, science in its true form… they just aren’t painfully loud like the other crowd.

 

Now, let me head off, this is entirely a matter of intentions.  If you are feeling guilty because you had been led to believe that Perceivers don’t make good employees (read that one verbatim on Twitter), that Extraverted Feeling is equivalent to a crying baby (not going to name that website), or that Sensors are the only practical ones (*sigh* too many websites and books to even name if I wanted to), don’t worry; I’m probably not talking about you.  Misunderstanding or being misled on a topic, because the magazine science was the only version you had, is not your fault.  I am pissed to death (gah, that’s rather graphic, isn’t it?) at the people who *propagate* those misconceptions, willfully.  Again, these are the people who are dishonest with themselves because the truth makes them uncomfortable.  I truly can’t express how dangerous the mentalities propagated by the examples above and other attitudes like them truly are, but if you don’t *want* to instill those attitudes in our culture, that’s good enough for me.

Well, and I guess I should add that there is a third type of person, the ones who haven’t chosen a side yet.  People who want to get along with everyone, and so try and say that the two sides are the same.  Honestly, these are the people I struggle with the most.  I love the group that is honest with themselves, and I can roll my eyes at those who aren’t, but it is so hard for me not to try and *prove* the truth to those who still believe the people who don’t want truth.  And the fence-sitters don’t want to be the ones to decide if I’m right or wrong (thus the fence-sitting), and so they say things like “Well, I like what you have to say, but my friend here is skeptical.”  (Skeptical is usually a buzzword for “They don’t *want* you to be right, so they’re looking for a chink in your armor.”)  And so I’m suddenly put on the spot to prove myself to their “skeptical” friend.

But you can’t reason someone out of a conclusion they didn’t arrive at via reason, and *wanting* someone to be wrong is one of the most common emotional reasons to believe something.  It won’t matter how many times I’ve explained something, in how many languages, using how many analogies, with how much data and examples, no matter how many times I’ve typed something out in black and white; if someone doesn’t want to understand something, their reading comprehension drops down to zero.

And so, I’ve decided to stop trying.  Your skeptical friend is never going to see reason because he doesn’t want to.  I am literally wasting my breath (or finger motions, I suppose), while there are *so many people* emailing me who have real questions and want real answers.  And *those* are the people I am going to prioritize.  No more am I going to waste precious word-count on trying to prove anything.

And, honestly, I am not going to waste my energy feeling guilty if I don’t post exactly what you want me to post either.  I’m not going to promise, “You can expect this post by the end of the month.”  What I will promise you, instead, is that I will give you an accurate, repeatable, scientific picture of humanity that will demonstrate to you everything you and everyone else can be.  Even if that takes a month or more of me not posting anything, so I can be sure I know what that picture is.

In conclusion, *thank you* for being patient while I got to the bottom of this.  Thank you for your wonderful emails inspiring hope in me, that maybe the “general consensus” isn’t so general after all.  Thank you for sticking with aLBoP, even when it might be easy to move on to updates-more-often pastures.  As you stick around, I promise I’ll always make it worth the wait, all on the way to discovering the version of you that you *really* want to be.

Much love!
Calise <3