"I don't think that being a strong person is about ignoring your emotions and fighting your feelings. Putting on a brave face doesn't mean you're a brave person. That's why everybody in my life knows everything that I'm going through. I can't hide anything from them. People need to realise that being open isn't the same as being weak."

- Taylor Swift

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Split Personality.

I know I keep talking about this and I know some people think it's just hokum but it's really quite fascinating.

Personality. Hmm.

An INFP personality means Introvert, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving. It's all very complicated, but it's considered to be the dreamy, idealist personalities. These people are also called Healers. If you think that that doesn't sound like me, then, well, maybe you know my business suit; a superficial personality projected subconsciously when in environment in which the INFP personality is a liability. My 'businesss suit' is an ESTJ, which is, ironically, the personality of George W. Bush.

Hmm. That's maybe why people don't like me much. Or why lots of people say 'I didn't like you until I got to know you better'.

I am very tired of high school. High school is a bit like everything else that is standardized and industrialized - you lose so much. I hate cliques. Cliques are little cages that your friends are equally distributed amongst people you don't know and/or don't like, and then that cage is kept under lock and key. The most I can do is rattle the bars a little.

I am terrified of people I don't know. I'm even more terrified of a group of people I don't know. As much as I hated my primary school I spent eight years there - I was given the opportunity, but I was terrified of being 'the new kid'. There was a kind of glamour about being one of the few people who have been there from thebeginning - veterans, as it were; old hands. I am scared of high school cliques, because it's a fear of the unknown. I don't understand social dynamics at all.

But aside from that...

I've always known that I am a very different person publicly than I am privately. Some of it is conscious; some of it is a deliberate charade. But most of it is a subconscious decision to behave one way or another. When I am at home, when I am alone (or relatively alone) with people, when I am  with people I know and trust; I am a completely different person. At school, in the community, I am another. I'm not saying that I have two names (well, I do, but never mind), two wardrobes, two completely different people in one body; I have two personalities, not two identities. Multiple personality disorder is a major misnomer. Actually having two personalities but one identity is, I think, a relatively common phenonmenon; at least, I really like to think so.

Before now I grouped the people I know into two distinct categories - people who know me as the introvert, and people who know me as the extravert. The people who only know me at school, and only really talk to me occasionally, know me as the insatiable flirt; the person who's always up for a bubbly conversation. The people I know outside of school, or through more metaphysical mediums, often catch me when I'm more introverted. This is, by the way, following the Myers-Briggs definition of 'introvert' and 'extravert' (and yes, it is spelt like that) - introverts gain energy from within and expend energy around people; extraverts are opposite. I blog, largely, as an introvert - except for some of the very silly posts - someone commented that I talk a lot about myself, and I suppose that's true. I'm all for self-reflection and soul searching.

It's when those two spheres collide that things get confusing. I don't know how to behave around people who know me as an introvert in an environment where I cannot function as anything but an extravert. It just feels very vulnerable. And I feel like other people must feel like that, too.

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