Interesting

You Are An ISFJ

The Nurturer You have a strong need to belong, and you very loyal. A good listener, you excel at helping others in practical ways. In your spare time, you enjoy engaging your senses through art, cooking, and music. You find it easy to be devoted to one person, who you do special things for. You would make a good interior designer, chef, or child psychologist.

What's Your Personality Type?

I remember taking the myers briggs personality test in high school and again in college, and I always got ENFP . . . either this quickly test is screwy or I've changed a lot since high school. Or maybe the two aren't mutually exclusive. I know that over the course of the last five years or so, I've definitely become more introverted. It's not that I enjoy people less but rather that I need more time to myself, for myself. Also it probably has to do with being seriously let down by people that I was close to--both friends and boyfriends. . . stuff like that happens and you, or more appropriately, I'm prone to withdraw not just from that person, but from people more generally.

I feel something similar happening now amidst all of the major changes that are happening and about to happen in my life. One thing about turmoil and seismc shifts--they tend to separate the wheat from the chaff. Put another way, you learn who your true friends are. They're the ones who are nothing but happy for you and your success . . . They're the ones who are supportive, not out of self-interest, but because they care more about you than they care about themselves. Sadly, I'm reminded as of late that not everyone is that way. it's particularly hard for me to accept because even in the midst of all of my failure last year on the job market, a point that for many academics is akin to a professional rock bottom, it never occurred to me to be anything but happy for my friends who first got interviews, then campus visits, and then jobs, some of which I applied for. It never occurred to me even when one of these friends got an interview request while we were getting coffee, stressing about the job market. Even then, as I wanted to melt into the linoleum floor from disappointment and frustration, I never thought to be anything less than happy for my friend, who I knew had been working as hard as I had. I guess I wasn't aware, consciously at least, that there are people out there who make these kinds of things about them. I mean, who does that? This is, of course, a rhetorical question.

One of the things that I hate above all else is to be disappointed in people. Note the preposition--I'm not saying that I hate to be disappointed BY people. That kind of thing happens--it's just human nature, especially when you have high standards for others, and I'll admit that I do have high standards. I hate to be disappointed IN people--that's a whole other ballgame that has little to do with me or my standards and everything to do with others and their actions, or lack thereof.

The thing that especially sucks about it is that the people I'm referring to, however obliquely, are exactly the ones that should be nothing but happy for me given the fact that they have benefitted enormously from my experiences, both positive and negative. They know, in other words (if only abstractly) how hard this success was to come by for me. I don't expect them to appreciate what a big deal either the job or the fellowship is since they've not had any experience in academia and haven't walked 10 steps, let alone a mile, in my shoes.

But what I have realized in the last week or so is that there are plenty of people in my life who aren't self-involved and self-absorbed, who are suportive instead of destructive, who know just how hard it is to land a job in an English dept (a quick statistic: according to the most recent information released by the MLA, which granted isn't super-recent, less than half--42% to be exact--of Ph.D.s in English ended up with tenure-track jobs. This statistic is even more dire in my subfield). So the fact that I landed a job, and good one at that, is something to be proud of. It's not the sexiest job of my colleagues, but it's a really good job, and it's a great fit for me personally.

So from this moment on, I'm taking a page out of my new College President's book. She's awesome and her enthusiasm is contagious. When I met her, she told me she was looking for people who were as excited about the college mission as she was, and as far as she was concerned, people could either get on the train or they could get out of the way. I think that's my attitude from here on in.

Now is not the time to flinch!