My newest obsession?  Myers-Briggs personality type testing.  It’s kind of the slightly less embarrassing version of the tests that occasionally pop up on my Facebook newsfeed–“If I were a character in Twilight, I would be Alice Cullen!”  While I’ll never admit to identifying with any vampire or vampire-phile, I will ask you your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) during the slightest lull in conversation.

MBTI basically puts people into one of two buckets in four categories–extraversion/introversion, intuitive/sensing, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving.  People get assigned to their closest extreme in these four categories, for a total of sixteen personality types.

I learned about MBTI at a workshop with a counselor from the Career Development Center, but there are tons of tests online to take.  (My favorite one is this one, though that is technically a Jung test, based on MBTI.)  I admit, I was skeptical at first, eager to go on lengthy diatribes about how I couldn’t be categorized–MBTI, you don’t know me.  I obediently took the test, though, trying to resist the impulse to look up the possible personalities and tailor my test questions accordingly.

Upon getting my personality type, I rapidly became obsessed with looking it up to the point that I was worried that I was becoming a narcissist.  It started with some low-level Googling and reading on Wikipedia, and then it quickly spiraled into an excessive search that spanned some truly archaic websites, and I’m embarrassed to say, some personality type forums.  There was something so addicting about reading passages, supposedly about myself, and then smugly categorizing them as true or false.  I like to think that I gained a little insight into myself, but really, I think it is equally likely that I made my neuroticisms worse by explicitly acknowledging them.

I am an INFJ–introverted, intuitive, feeling, judging.  This apparently means that I need time alone to regain energy, I prefer theories to facts, I make decisions based on emotions, and I prefer to have things planned out (all at least somewhat true).  For one, I do spend a lot of time alone, reading about MBTI, which is, in its essence, a theory on personality.  If I were more rational, I would stop wasting huge amounts of time reading the same material, and the affinity for planning was made quite apparent in my last column.  While I think that this may be an exaggeration of my personality, some descriptions of my type were eerily accurate.  The best find?  A description of something called a “Death Spiral” that more or less perfectly depicts my somewhat problematic personal life.

Take the test.  Email me your results.  Though I have technically banned any further Googling of MBTI for myself, I’m pretty sure conversations about the topic are still on the table.