Sorry, Not Sorry (Where We’ve Been and Novel!)

Hi there aLBoP peoples.  A lot of you have probably wondered “are they still doing that personality thing anymore?  Seriously, they haven’t posted literally anything since a global pandemic hit.  And I was stuck at home a lot during that.  Guys, for once I probably would have wanted to read something that was tens of thousands of words long, and that was exactly when you didn’t post anything!  Think how much the algorithms would have been in your favor if you had churned stuff out when people were stuck at home and wanted to understand themselves and the people they were locked in their houses with!”

Maybe you didn’t think any of that.  Maybe that’s just what I think when I stop posting things and get scared everyone moves on to something newer, sparklier, with better laid out menus and much better grammatical correctness.  (That was supposed to be a case-in-point joke, but maybe that’s technically grammatically correct?  Beats me.)

But you may have wondered where we went, because we get a lot of emails wondering where we went, and we’ve hardly posted any posts on this site in several years.  Not like we were ever in the running for frequent or consistent update awards.

I mean, there’s plenty here to read, because Justin (my INFJ) and I are both quite wordy, to our occasional shame.  And there’s so much content here that isn’t elsewhere, and with so many words, we very much encourage rereading.  But so much is half-shared, half-revealed, and we understand if that’s frustrating.

We certainly haven’t forgotten that none of the FPs and TJs, except for INTJs, have Type Hero posts yet.  (Guys, I’ve had the quotes for all 16 picked since 2013!  It kills me too!! 😩)

Or that I said in a video in 2014 that we’d unveil Facial Typing by the end of the year.  Ha.  Well we’ve talked about it lots of places, and we’ve been using it for Typings since… I don’t remember honestly.  Quite a few years.  It works on everybody, and it just proves more consistent all the time.  Anytime I get imposter syndrome, which is pretty frequently, I look back and I’m like “But wait, people who are now among my very best friends, I was able to predict their deepest fears, and desires from their faces alone, before I knew them at all.”

Like there’s an ENTP(ij) in Brazil that literally sent us a picture of his face, with no words or anything.  Without facial typing, I wouldn’t have guessed ENTP(ij) from the photo or the few interactions we’d had before that point.  Now he’s a great friend and runs our Twitter and makes us crack up all the time, in such an Expectable Reactions way, working like a champ on his Megamind Complex.  (Sorry to pick on you, buddy 😉 I won’t mention his name, although he’s likely not to mind.)

Where was I going with that?  I derailed myself.  Oh, where we’ve been.  Basically we didn’t forget or give up on this A Little Bit of Personality site, the cognition site, or “Phase 1” as we affectionately call it.  Nor did we run out of content.  Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.  No sir.

Nor did we stop writing, which is really the intent of this post.

People who haven’t read any of aLBoP Phase 2, or the few posts he’s written here on Phase 1, sometimes don’t know that Justin writes for aLBoP at all.  Some people even think he’s quiet, or doesn’t have a lot to say 🤣.  This amuses (and occasionally irks) me.

I mean, it’s fine if people just don’t know.  And a lot of people probably don’t know that he wrote 98% of the COGs.

Sometimes I also get a little moody because whenever people tell us their favorite aLBoP quotes, 99% of those are from the COGs, so most of the time it’s something Justin wrote, not me, and I get dramatic “does my writing even matter and is it any good?!” feels.  But it’s okay, because we’ve developed these many tools that we use on our own feels, on the daily.  Also he really is a phenomenally powerful writer, so I’m really happy when people praise him.  I did all the pictures for the COGs though!  Well, and I was the primary discoverer of the cognition steps, and how that works, etc.  It’s not like I didn’t do plenty for them.  It’s just very obviously his prose.  We tag team good.

But anyone who has read a fraction of “What is Smart?” or any of the Phase 2 intro, or any of the Phase 2/Phase 2-Intro posts knows my boy is eloquent AF, if you’ll pardon the expression.  Also, so much wordier than I am.  And I find tens of thousands of words to elaborate on the deeper, applicable meanings of scary shows and rock bands.

But Justin can talk for literal days about what the 1939 German invasion of Poland has to do with your life right now, or how to know if you’re going into emotional debt and why it’s taking a bigger toll on your life than you realize, or the 4Toi of emotion.

And he does.  No joke, I’m thousands of messages behind on group chat conversations he’s had on topics like that.  When he talks, he just goes.  And while I tease him about tangents and getting off topic, because he certainly does that, everything he says is toward something, with something new to add to every single topic I’ve ever heard him talk about.  Yes, I’m bragging.  I’m allowed to do that after being married for 13.5 years and being constantly re-impressed with him.  And no, I’m not going to let him edit this part, even if he’s shy about me saying all this about him. [Justin: SAYS YOU, YOU FOOL! I EDIT! By writing this here]

But none of those thousands and thousands of words he writes regularly are *here*, on Phase 1.  So people just have no clue.  Most of his writing is for Full Phase 2, and while we’re planning to let a bunch more people into Full Phase 2 (I hope before long), and while the awesome people who have applied have waited such a long time for us… still at the moment, it’s hidden to all but a few dozen people.

Likewise, although I am not as fast a writer as Justin, by a long shot 😩 (which he’ll “😛” about me saying, since I get mean to myself), I still write 12-15 thousand words in an average month, I’d estimate.  *They’re just not here.*

Lately, for me, they’re fiction.  But as Justin is fond of saying, “A good story is worth a thousand lectures.”  There’s a reason that Sensing and iNtuition are equal functions, that we all need both of: Concepts are not enough on their own.  Everyone needs Experience.  And sure, we can stumble through life, requiring to have every experience ourselves before we learn and apply things.  Or, we can learn from what other people have been through, be it history or fantasy, as long as those stories mirror reality.  Sci-fi and fantasy don’t “not count,” so long as they reflect all four Types of Information accurately.  In fact, sometimes suspending real life rules, we can find the beautiful universal truths underneath them, seeing sides of things and people that we might not get to otherwise.  We can learn vicariously through situations we might never experience on our own, and that shows us things about others and ourselves that we’d likely not find alone.

Basically, long story short, I’ve been spending the majority of my writing time on the story of a boy with good motives and terrible decisions (no, he’s not an EP, shockingly. Js can make terrible decisions too, believe it or not 😉), who is forced down a path to discover who his “self” really is, when the whole world, and seemingly circumstances, tell him that selfness is fleeting and changeable.

So, I’m really truly sorry that there haven’t been new cognition posts, to help carry you through a global pandemic, with new heights of domestic violence, uncertainty and hopelessness, that many of us weren’t used to in our lives before that.  Please believe that a day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about how many are searching for lights at the ends of tunnels, not new, but certainly not improved by world events the last few years.  And maybe I did write a 20k word post about Hope and Depression, about 3.5 months before the pandemic hit, that you could have/can now go read, to help, I hope… I’m still sorry it wasn’t just cognition tools, and I’m even more sorry if you felt left alone in the cold.

I’m sorry we take a really long time to reply to Typing orders sometimes.  We do really care, both about you having the vulnerability to email us about yourself, and pictures of your face, and that you give us your valuable resources in exchange.  We do really appreciate people paying for typings.  I am going to throw out there that if we were in this for the money, we would be really really stupid to go about it this way.  Like epic levels of stupid and arrogant.  Which we’ve been called, so, just sayin’.  We still do typings, fyi for the people who worry when we take a while to reply.  They’re just not the primary thing we do under the umbrella of “aLBoP.”

My mom had a sweet friend who wanted to buy a t-shirt recently, after I typed her, and I was embarrassed that when I looked, I had the wrong URL for the shirt website.  That’s how long it had been since I had given thought to people buying t-shirts, long enough for Spreadshirt to change how their URLs work.  (And have a data-leak, so I’m sorry if you got an email about needing to change your password and stuff.)  It’s just not the priority right now, at all.  (That being said, if you still want a t-shirt, here’s the updated URL, lol.  I haven’t changed links anywhere else.  I’m fully aware they’re wrong, I just have other things to do.)

It’s not that teaching you about cognition isn’t important.  That’s not why there haven’t been more posts.  It’s not that I hate popularity and money, or milking the easy algorithm of “MBTI” or other topics people *actually search for.*  It’s that we are two individual people, trying to build an undersea city, and Phase 1 sees the spire of the tallest building, and thinks that’s all we have.  I’m sorry if the paint job on the tower is scuffed.  But I’m a little busy building Atlantis with my scuba gear.  Is that an arrogant analogy?  Probably!  But I don’t got time for modesty for the sake of appearances either.

You know how most social apps recommend stuff to you, based on what you’ve already read/watched/listened to?  They have whole apps based on that concept, recommending stuff you’ll like, based on stuff you already like.  It’s like a more surface level version of Sources (of using Perceiving to know who to trust and listen to).  That’s all I’m doing with this post:

“So you like A Little Bit of Personality?  If you like that, you’ll probably like…”

Except in this case, I’m saying if you like this website, because it makes things feel clear, because you can find things here that you’ve never found anywhere else, and they work—not just in theory or concept, but *in practice*—and you want more; if you keep checking back because what we said made the clouds part, and you want to experience that again, then we’ve got more where that came from.  Not right here, not solely about cognition, and some of it gated—never financially, but by a demonstration of applying what we shared to that point—but guys, we have so much more where that came from.

And I’d recommend, on your tour of a much larger aLBoP world, (before the Phase 2 Intro, if you haven’t read that yet) your next stop be A Little Bit of Calise and Barry Anderson: An Unexpected Fairy Tale.  Read the Foo Fighters post about hope, and my silly Sides posts, and consider if you have aspects of your selfness that need some love.  And I have just posted the second chapter of Barry Anderson, my novel that I’m posting one chapter at a time.  (I also just posted the audiobook version of the first chapter, and the “soundtrack” songs that go with the first two chapters, and commentary about them.  Because I’m extra like that.)

It’s about fairies.  And gender.  And selfness.  And becoming the best version of yourself, while still being you—which has always been the entire goal of this website.  Why is that worth taking years away from posting about cognition?  (Even though over 250k words of Barry, so far, are far from all I’ve been doing the last few years, it’s still been my most central project, I’d say.  *Disclaimer*: Two chapters aren’t most of that word count… well, okay, they’re 41k together, but the plot has barely even started by the end of Chapter 2!!  (For scale, the *longest* chapter of Harry Potter is 9,001 words.  I’m so sorry.))

But yeah, let me repeat the question:  Why is a comedy story about fairy godmothers worth leaving people without the help that understanding cognition might provide?  Because, despite my constant argument with myself, Barry Anderson is *not* just a silly, mildly scandalous novel, in a genre that’s basically “Shakespeare Comedy meets 80’s Teen Flick,” although it certainly is all of those things.  Not that I’m doubting the emotional power of Twelfth Night, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Better Off Dead, or Back to the Future, which I study with rapture, from the hands of story lords.  But mine is written with the same purpose as this website.

My first novel, “completed” on my sixteenth birthday, had a few different names over my teen years.  I felt like I had to call it something cool or no one would want to read it.  As a teenager, I didn’t feel like I could just call a story “Ellic.”  It had to be “The Kingdom Chronicles: A Hope for Identity”, with “The Kingdom Chronicles” being the series title, and “A Hope for Identity” being that particular story.  This was later replaced by “The Dallanian Kingdom Chronicles: Ellic’s Story”, which ain’t half bad, so I don’t know if any of that will stay when I rewrite it later.  But most of the time I just call it “Ellic.”

I’ve come to embrace the fact that all my stories are first and foremost character stories, and almost* all of my elevenish active stories are named for the protagonist(s).  So the title is literally one or two protagonist names, or a name that describes the protagonist group.  (*Okay, there are two exceptions.  I forgot those at first, and changed my wording, lol.  But those are named for the central plot-nouns that involve the characters changing.)

But “Barry Anderson: A Hope for Identity” would probably be even more fitting than the title would have been for Ellic (although they’re both sixteen-year-old INFJ(j)s.  Paradoxitype and stuff!  Don’t judge!).  Identity is a humanity battleground, and honestly I’m tired of all arguments on all sides of such issues.  I’m tired of so many of the arguments related to central questions of human nature, being groups of people flinging feces in the dark.

Do you want to know who you are?  Are you tired of other people defining that, badly?  Does aLBoP help you feel like you can find your forever-self, while not capping anything about who that person can be?  Well have I got the story for you! 😉

It’s not a children’s story, despite having a lot of fairies, tutus, glitter and rhymes.  You could play a drinking game with the number of mammary euphemisms there are (some of which I’m exceedingly proud of).  But it’s got heart; a lot of raw, exposed, vulnerable heart.  And I think that’s what the world needs right now, along with themes about choice, change, plans, hope, and “the jewel of each soul.”

So, I guess, TL;DR: We’ve been gone because we were prioritizing other parts of aLBoP, never because we didn’t care, or gave up.  And I’m sharing one of my novels, and it’s fun and you should, like, totally read it!  It has the same objectives as this website, so if you’re into that kinda thing, then it’ll be your jam.

Although if you really didn’t read this because this post was too long, this probably won’t be your favorite website ever, heads-up.  You probably won’t like our other websites, sorry.  You can be excused.

Anyway, I realized I never said over here that I had posted any of my fiction, so sorry if anyone wanted to read it and just didn’t know!  Hey, if you would, comment below about how you see when we update, so I can try and use those methods more.

Not just saying, really true:
<3 Much love,
Calise