hats & filters.

Have you ever taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment? I have. It's been an eye opening and integral part of my professional and personal development over the last few years. Basically, there are different personality dimensions that represent your preferences - not what you do 100% of the time, but what you gravitate to and find a sense of comfort in. It's funny how just a few letters can set you on a path to a deeper sense of self-awareness. My personality type is:

Introversion
Sensing
Thinking
Judging

I love my 'S' and my 'J'. I embrace the ability to take in all of the details and plan the hell out of things. I love order, facts (I work in an ideal job where I am up to my ears in data), and I organize everything. The combination of these preferences makes me feel borderline OCD, but as long as I am a highly efficient and functioning OCD, I embrace that too.

The combination of my "I" and my "T" tend to screw me over. Ahh, this blog of mine is generally photos of my kid, but we're taking a different direction tonight. Introversion: pretty self explanatory, right? I am not a center of attention, public speaking, first to volunteer kind of girl. Thinking: this one is a bit tricker. I like to think of this as logical and rational, without being clouded down with emotion. This isn't to say that I'm an emotionless robot, but I make decisions after thinking out pros and cons, and you will rarely hear me say "I feel blah blah blah" (unless it's about being tired).

So back to my dilemma: I don't want to sugar coat, I like to say it and hear it straight, and I cannot stand nonsense or hemming and hawing over a situation because of being uncomfortable. Just.say.it. Combine that with introversion and the result is that I have a lot on my mind without much coming out of my mouth. I think this stems from a sense of awareness of other people's innate preferences - if a person is more drawn to feelings and emotions, I am respectful of that personal space. Respectful to the point of losing my voice.

Enter relationships, the boundaries in which you feel a certain level of comfort with others (and therefore comfort to venture outside of your preferences), but in which you are the actor of a certain role. The metaphor about wearing different hats is an appropriate illustration for this idea: I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister, a friend, etc. etc etc. In each of these relationships, there's almost a contract of behavior that requires you to strap on your compassionate filter, your understanding filter, your hold-your-tongue-until-you-nearly-bite-it-off-filter. In a perfect world, I could throw both my hat and my filters out with last week's garbage, but that would leave the 'feelers' in tears and my relationships in shambles.

It's time to find a better balance.