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If you’re a connoisseur of any social networking site then you know that if you’re having an identity crisis there’s no need to worry. There’s a multitude of online tests you can take that will tell you exactly what your personality type is, gently nudging you towards several labels that you can define yourself by.
“What Personality Type Are You?” is one such example. A, B, and C were the options, and I took the test with a careful amount of deliberate irony. I can’t remember what my exact result was, only that it was inevitably wrong. In the end, they’re like horoscopes, palm readers and psychics in that with a few choice, vague phrases they can fool you into believing they know everything about you.
I realise, or dearly hope, that most people take these tests as a joke. I can’t imagine anyone making a major life choice based on them. But, like me, perhaps there’s a small part of them that hopes they’ll be given an in-depth explanation of who they are, a result that’s catered specifically to them with a reassurance that they’re not psychopaths/mentally ill/abnormal. Life would be so much easier if we knew ourselves completely, there’s no denying that. I don’t know about you, but my mind and emotions do very strange things on a regular basis without my permission.
For example: during my second year of university I had the attic room of our quality student house, and I actually liked the people I was living with. I lived there for two years, and knew my fellow housemates for at least that long if not longer. Yet, I was extremely reluctant to go downstairs and socialise at the end of every day. I enjoyed being downstairs; we gathered around the TV and criticised the programmes in a hilarious manner, but getting there was my problem. I had all day to be anti-social, but the prospect of bumping into someone whilst on a trip to the kitchen or loo sometimes confined me to my room for hours on end. What was I afraid of? That they’d suddenly snap and kill me? I will never know.
Sometimes it takes me ages to realise that I’m nervous or stressed about something. In the weeks before a plane trip or travelling expedition my general mood can suddenly slump and I become an introverted ball of stress. Logically, I’ve figured out the cause of it by now. But it took me a long time to link the effect to the cause; I still have to sort through a range of possible reasons for a bad mood before I settle on the most likely one. If only I could just know instantly – “Oh, you don’t want to go downstairs because you’re lazy. That’s it.”
Still, I suppose it makes life interesting. How boring would it be if you knew every aspect of how your mind and personality work? There’d be no self-mystery, no self-discovery, no mystique about the human condition. Maybe we’re all better off not knowing. Throw out that manual on your personality type, cast away the test results that tell you you’re a type B personality with stronger left brain activity. You’re a chaotic, puzzling and incomprehensible individual who’s too complex and confusing to be explained by a thousand or even a hundred thousand categories. They will never be enough to explain all of who you are, and that’s okay.
