In a timely coincidence, this image has been making the meme rounds in Facebook and whatnot:

It’s timely because I just got the results back from a Myers Briggs personality assessment. Happy to say this time around it was paid for by work, but I’m still all working and employed and shit. Unlike the last official “personality assessment” on my permanent record this one was all warm and fuzzy.

Anyway, turns out I have a personality. Of sorts.

Here’s the timely of the timely part — heretofore, I tested as INTP. I totally have thought of myself as a giant, big old, introverted “I.” I love being alone. I love processing shit my own way in my own time. Better a couple. of great friends than a crowd, yada, fucking, yada.

Then, round about a decade ago, probably longer, I decided to come out of shyness with a vengeance. Now I totally dig that Carl Jung wasn’t saying introversion is the same as shyness, but I never got “my energy,” as the pop psych crowd would have it, from crowds. Holding back seemed like a fine response to life.

Only thing was, I had journals and private writings. I had words I wanted to say, thoughts rattling in the brain pan. The older I got the more I realized that the world was going ahead without me.

Like a terrible version of the crazy that was G. Gordon Liddy overcoming fear by eating a rat and tying himself to a tree in a lightning store, I took an adult ed class in stand up comedy. To overcome a fear of public speaking, to bring my writing public, to speak out, to shake my own personal status quo, to step up and out, I thought going on stage would be a good idea.

I almost puked and shat myself the final night of class, when we stood behind a mike at an actual comedy club. I didn’t try again for two years, when I screwed up the courage and took another class.

Ultimately, I whacked away at it for a while and got comfortable(ish) on stage. Comfortable enough to combine most sane people’s two biggest fears, getting naked and standing alone on stage with nothing but my jokes. The butterflies and/or gurgling fear of evacuating my bowels stopped.

I have no scientific proof, but I feel like I took the skills acquired on stage to other settings. The stage and writing cliche is that I found my voice.

Turns out that voice had other things to say besides jokes. When I moved west and interviewed for a job, I was outspoken and direct and more outwardly reaching than I remember being back east. Whatever made me get in stage sunk in and stuck

So the other day, I fired up the interwebs in my workplace and took the Myers Briggs dealio on account of some professional coaching I’m doing. Well, I’m not coaching. I’m subjecting myself to a little coaching action on account of wanting to be a better person and cog and all.

Lo and fucking behold, my trusty reliable “I” is now and extroverted “E.” This time around the test says I’m ENTP.

I don’t know how the hell it happened, but I turned into somebody else.