The unbearable
unlightness of being
INTJ

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Who am I?
The Core
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I took the Myers-Briggs personality test out of sheer curiosity, since it seemed that everyone in my websphere of influence knew their own four letters, and just waiting to have fun with it. In general, personality tests get it right on some features -- but then horoscopes get it right too. Besides, I believe it's rather useless trying to expose a whole human personality using a numerical scale, some labels, letters, or any other set of symbols.

Nevertheless, I took the test. It told me I was an INTJ, and it told me what it meant. Aside from a couple exceptions, it was as if a therapist who had been treating me for years told me what he'd observed during all that time. It also told me certain things I wouldn't have told a shrink, things he'd have had to live with me to know.

INTJ means Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Judging. These four features place me within a tiny group among the population, around 1% of the whole. You people are lucky there are not more of us, probably, since we would not let you live in peace.

I'm informed we INTJs have problems establishing interpersonal relationships (as if I need to be told). We're too demanding, and we become too easily impatient. Mostly, we want people to do sensible stuff, with a given purpose. We don't want to waste our time in stupid things. Our tact leaves much to be desired, even when we manage to stop our sharp tongue (with a painful effort we're usually not willing to perform twice). We don't care a fig about friendship when it tries to overstep the boundaries of important stuff, like truth or our free time.

Though they may not know, when we make friends or lovers, he or she will have passed through a hard test process. Personality, deeds and sayings have been captured and processed. Sometimes it's not the concrete things that matter, but what's intuited. We can forget horrible offences if they don't fit in the general scheme, but if the general scheme turns out unsatisfactory, the machinery gets stuck and spits out a disfavouring verdict, which is usually not subject to appeals. But we don't reject people who reject without a motive. When someone or something elicits a rejection, we won't rest until we produce a mental report of the reasons, in painful detail.

I'm also told we have problem with authority figures and conventionalisms. Whoever has read the rest of this website will realise how true this is in my case, at least. As an INTJ, I feel a measureless contempt towards the ideas that tradition is inherently good, that there are people with "natural authority", or that one should respect anyone who hasn't earned this respect. The only thing keeping me from becoming an anarchist is my tendency to look for an established, sensible frame, and defend it while it works. One of the yes-no questions in the test I took was "You place higher value on justice than on mercy". Reluctantly I filled in "Yes". Actually I do value justice higher than mercy, but above all I'm interested in what's convenient for the given goals. Human justice often seeks revenge and compromise, instead of compensating for what's unjust or trying to avoid it in the future; and sometimes what's conveniente for everyone turns out unjust or unsatisfactory.

Religion didn't manage to survive my INTJness. While it had a minimum amount of sense and didn't bother me much, I left it alone, but as soon as I started wishing I could sleep on Sunday mornings and didn't find a suitable excuse to justify my indoctrinated idea that going to Mass was "right", the former practising Catholic swept all precepts away and buried them with the toys of his childhood. Later, as I grew up, I started to build my own life system, and I found out I needed a new foundation. God didn't work for long; he was badly defined, he was arbitrary, he didn't give me any clear answers, and he was like a maladjusted piece in the puzzling but sensible world I was discovering around me. God died when I was 21, more or less, but he was probably in a coma since the beginning of my teens.

We INTJs also have a couple of virtues (depending on how you look at them). Whenever we're interested in something, we won't rest until we master it, or at least know enough about it as to be able to do something with it. We like touching and manipulating stuff, changing and shaping it according to our wishes. As a result, we're almost never satisfied with a software product, for example. Before a new object, our first reactino is exploration, followed by the mental compilation of a thorough, devastating list of things that could have been done better (usually, that we could have done better). Even when the creator is a loved one and is standing beside us, we have a hard time lying, and although we keep ourselves from lethally injuring their feelings and self-esteem, we usually leave them pretty contuse. And we care, and we feel hurt too, but It Was Something We Had To Say.

Sometimes I ask myself what it would be like to have a group of people under my command. It turns out that we INTJs are apparently born leaders, but this seems to have failed about me. According to what I've read, it seems this aptitude for leadership comes from the J feature, and I must be on the edge here, since I look a bit like my completementy personality type, INTP, of who it is said something that applies to me: doesn't like to lead, doesn't want to take charge even knowing to be the best one for the job, and in general just chooses to bite his or her nails in the background, alert and nervous, while the least able make a mess of the matter, and then furiously take command after they've utterly ruined it. Yes, people, that's me. In my job, I like to have everything near the tips of my fingers, so to speak, but I hate having to control everything. And yet, day after day I have to do it. And I'm getting good at it, I think; maybe the J of INTJ is starting to get outside of its shell and reclaim its place. In any case, anyone who knows me knows that calling me a "born leader" would provoke me a hearty laugh.

So I don't like leadership, but I think it's because (deep down) I'm a good person and I know my niceness is very short-lived. Our INTJ combination of lack of respect for authority, our valuing of the naked truth over the dictates of friendship and loyalty, and the preeminence of obligations over food and rest, contribute to make us into insensitive monsters when we're not in explicit let's-have-fun mode, as both my poor mother and my brother are well aware. Lately I've been resorting to the sincerity of the obvious, and I'm excusing myself from helping or directing others with the pretext that I lose my patience very quick and prefer to preserve the peace.

Typical phrases:

• "It was something I had to say."
• "It's just like that and there's no way to change it."
• "Whatever, I don't care."
• "Yeah, yeah, that's all very nice but..."
• "Finish what you started."
• "It doesn't convince me."
• "Think about it a bit more and come back later."
• "This could have been done better."
• "I don't understand how he doesn't get it."
• "What's the purpose of this?"
• "It just is, it doesn't have to do something."
• "Don't bother me, I'm working."
• "I say things and you don't get them, is something wrong with you?"
• "I'll make it work even if that's the last thing I do in my life."
• "I don't have time to eat."
• "I don't have time for that stupid thing."
• "I didn't come here to do that."
• "There's a time to have fun, but it's not now."
• "That has no relationship with reality!"
• "I have more interesting things to do."
• "Don't make me do this."
• "I asked you not to make me do this."
• "I know myself, and believe me, you don't want to."
• "It's your problem."
• "And that was all?"

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