On Self-Knowledge and Contradictory Traits

So I took that self-knowledge questionnaire a lot of my friends have been doing lately. The results were interesting and relatively insightful. 

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RATIONALITY

You like clarity and intelligent simplicity and you get frustrated at messy thinking. This can make you seem unreasonably pushy to some, but it is actually a virtue: you are motivated by a horror at pointless effort and a longing for precision and insight into how things and people work. Your ability to synthesise and bring order is essential in producing thinking which is truly helpful.

INDEPENDENCE

You don’t set out to be different for its own sake; you are more easily guided by what interests and moves you. You are more concerned about what is right for you than about the pressure to fit in. In sex you are more aware than others of impulses which are not entirely conventional. You know the value of selective irresponsibility, of forgetting occasionally about being ‘good’.

PLAYFULNESS

You are good at seeing what’s funny, at relaxing and finding the pleasure of the moment. Play is random, whimsical, fantasy-driven behaviour which releases internal tension. Because it is detached from some pressures it allows you to act on weirder, perhaps neglected, parts of yourself. The downside is that it is no help in sticking with things that are not much fun but which need to be addressed. So it is well complemented by its opposite, Stoicism.

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I find it interesting that two of my most dominant traits almost contradict one another. Almost. I've always been this odd mix of rational/logic-oriented and playful/imaginative. People that don't know me well almost always know of one of those sides to my personality or the other, but not necessarily both. It's almost always the rational side, as people will notice I'm smart or detail-oriented long before they ever see the side of me that far prefers playing, joking, and laughing to working and being serious about things. I love facts, learning, and reasoning but am completely uninterested in really applying those interests in a practical way that isn't also "fun".

The only time you see both traits at the same time is in my creative work. I remember teachers I had when I was a kid commenting on how unusual a combination it was. For instance, other kids I knew would write stories about the Care Bears that followed the actual imaginary characters through imaginary events taking place in their actual imaginary world. I'd write a story where I imagined my actual stuffed Care Bear toys being sentient and going through the experience of being laundered in the washing machine, spin cycle and all. I'd make what appeared to be elaborate fantasy paintings that had to have come straight out of my child's imagination without any rhyme or reason to them, but if asked, I'd be able to explain how each little inclusion was actually symbolic of some abstract concept. 

On a somewhat related note, I personally wish we lived in a world where society makes room for playfulness and rationality in equal measure. Too often, people want to separate an artist's creativity from the random nature that makes that creativity possible in the first place... or they want to separate a thinker's genius from the eccentricity that inspires them to think outside the box. It just doesn't work like that. It'a package deal. You want one, you have to take everything that comes along with it.

People Are Allowed

This rolled through my Facebook feed earlier. I posted it to my own page as well, but for some reason I never feel like people want to hear more than a couple of sentences as far as why I posted something these days. That's when I start to miss the days when blogging was the go-to way of communicating with others online. Not that I truly mind, of course. Keeping a blog mostly for myself (and the few people interested in reading something longer from me) is therapeutic in its own way.

The fact of the matter is if there is one lesson it's taken me most of my 40 years to really learn, it's the one covered by this graphic. My entire life people have tried to make me feel like I'm some horrible wreck of a person just for ending past relationships and friendships or for putting distance between myself and family members I consider to be toxic. Not because I was abusive or cruel while we were still part of each other's lives -- just for calling it quits and walking away.

Those people failed to understand that I didn't make those decisions in a vacuum. I don't go from wanting to know someone to not wanting to know them overnight or without cause. Those people don't apparently remember me trying to tell them when something was hurtful right before they dismissed my feelings by ordering me not to feel that way or telling me I was too sensitive and "needed to work on that". They don't remember the times I shared an interest, a dream, or a fear with them only to have them mock it and make me regret even trying. They don't remember the constant stream of suggestions, demands, comparisons, and little criticisms they lobbed my way over the years either -- all the little things that never let me forget I wasn't good enough.

On Tall Tales

Prompt: "What do you think of people who tell tall tales that are meant to entertain but not deceive?"

It depends on what's meant by "tall tale". Are you legit telling me an actual made-up story and presenting it as a work of fiction or are you exaggerating something from your life that I'm expected to accept as fact even if there's no earthly way it could possibly be true? I'm going to assume for all intents and purposes that it's the latter.

People that tell tall tales (a la Edward Bloom in Big Fish) honestly really irk me. I grew up around pathological liars that you couldn't trust to tell you the truth about anything. Sometimes the lies were malicious, but other times it was just about making something sound better or more exciting than it really was. My brother in particular really made a habit of this and would often lie just for the sake of lying. You took him at his word at your own peril because there would always be facts left out and other facts embellished at the very least. Every so often a story he told you would be a lie from beginning to end.