Not Your Ordinary Girl

My whole life I was told I wasn’t being agreeable to the way other people did things in a social situation.  I asked too many questions, or  I wasn’t as overexcited about things as others, or I tended to be realistic instead of optimistic because I learned that was the best way not to frustrate myself.   I enjoyed my solitude, a lot, but I didn’t really know much else either for a long time.

I was an only child, at least as far as I was concerned.  It was just my mom and I until I was almost 10, and those were the most formative years for me, really.  I had a bookcase full of books, and PBS to watch on my little black and white television and tons of journal books to write in and blank paper to draw on – besides my mom at home, I had only two cats as company, but I was very much OK with that.

My mom would have people over a lot, as she was the type that liked to entertain.  From a young age, I would hide in my room and hope she didn’t drag me out to talk to whoever she had over.  Sometimes this would be family, sometimes friends.  It was never personal to them, but on weekends or after school I’d be overwhelmed with people from the day or the week and want a break from it.

Fast forward to friendships and relationships, where I just didn’t prefer the typical stuff everyone else did.   I went to parties, and I did socialize, but I was more interested in hanging out with one friend or just being home when it was quiet.  Not all my friends enjoyed reading, not all of them enjoyed PBS, or what would eventually become the rabbit hole of knowledge seeking I did that I now enjoy but when I was younger, I worried about.  I’d just lose 3 hours flipping through Readers’ Digests and dictionaries and encyclopedias.

In no way do I knock most women, but I don’t get a lot of what they do, and I never did.  I never cared much for shopping, or a lot of wardrobe, or shoes, or makeup, or sad movies, or baby/wedding showers, and a lot of other traditional things I saw going on but didn’t seem to really take to.  I fell into what we used to call the “tomboy” group of girls who rode bikes and played basketball and climbed trees and wore jeans and caught reptiles and did things a lot of other girls didn’t understand about me either.

I was told by family and friends that my attitude and how I lived and interacted wasn’t going to help me much if I wanted certain things as I made my way through life, I was told I needed to figure out how to adjust to the way everyone else did things.  No one understood that doing that genuinely felt like being a fish out of water, they probably at times thought I was being difficult.  Until I was much older than 40, I actually believed it too, to some extent.   If only I had known about MBTI and that out there were others like me that also had no idea why they just couldn’t jump in with the majority and go along with what others were doing.

It’s comforting to know that you’re not being disagreeable, and that nothing is wrong with you, you are just in a minority group that exists but is hard to find.  The “I” in INTJ is the reason most of us think we’re alone and don’t find others like ourselves as easily.  We don’t do a ton of socializing…we leave that to the extroverts usually.   There is a big change in your life once you know you’re not as alien as you feared you were.

To all those who have discovered that you are in fact INTJ Female, that’s the first day of the rest of your life, really.  You can then let go of a lot of worry, and confusion and start to live your life.   Within our type there is a wide spectrum of women that are cuspy with every one of those letters, and that in itself is like a totally separate sub society. We are not cookie cutter by any means, but overall we have a much easier time talking to fellow women of our type.

Watching a large group of INTJ females is an awesome thing to experience, and I’m so glad I came so far from not knowing who I was, to finding others like myself, to watching others find their peers and seeing their lives change, to building a small society of like minded women.   I’m now pretty stoked I am INTJ, and love that I see things the way I do.   I hope you will as well.

~Lana