Friday, July 25, 2003
People person? Not so much
Ever since adolescence, I have consistently tested on the Myers-Briggs scale as an ENTJ, with the "E" standing for extrovert. In Meyers-Briggs World, "extrovert" can mean what it means in other contexts, but it also can have a special meaning related to how one functions. In my case, it means I thrive on mixing it up, intellectually speaking, with other people. I like a good argument, I like all the facts and opinions on the table, and when I'm at work I sometimes have to stop myself from assuming that everyone else I work with -- a fairly bright group of people, all told -- functions the same way I do. I have to remember that some folks' facts and opinions have to be drawn out of them; they won't necessarily volunteer. This seems obvious, but only in the past couple of years have I functioned with this idea in mind. God only knows what damage I did before that.
But there's another sense in which I am not an extrovert at all: By and large, I'm not a people person. You know how the liberal-arts major, graduating into a crummy job market, attempts to mask his lack of marketable skills by saying, "I'm a real people person!"? Well, I'm not a people person. Most people, in fact, piss me off, although I seldom act on that feeling one way or the other. In spite of the fact that I spent my adolescence suspecting that there was a really cool party somewhere that I was missing (and in spite of the fact that I attended a lot of really cool parties and even threw one or two), I've always been happier with one or two really close friends than a whole pile of casual acquaintances.
This has become a bit of an issue as I deal with my depression. My wife thinks it would be good if I got out more, spent some more time with other people. Her two specific suggestions in this regard so far have been: 1) Go play volleyball at our church at the weekly open-volleyball night; and 2) join a Rotary Club.
Now, #1 actually makes sense, in the sense that I played volleyball in college -- intramural, to be sure, but copiously and very competitively. I'm not much of a natural athlete, but I had almost a 30-inch vertical jump in high school and college, and even though I couldn't slam-dunk a basketball, I could sky, block and spike with the best on the volleyball court. The downside to this is that I've been badly out of shape since my first child was born and I stopped exercising regularly.
And you'd have to know me to know how little interest I have in joining a Rotary Club, or the Civitans (I'm too old for the Jaycees, thank God). Nothing against those organizations, but I'm not for them and they're not for me.
No, what I'd really like to do more of is read (I read zero books, zero, during the first year after our second child was born), write and blog. That's it. But my wife worries because she thinks that these activities, if not antisocial, are not gonna help my depression and might even make it worse. I think it's possible she's right but not likely.
The way she has raised this issue has struck me as patronizing, as if she thinks I'm too stupid to know how best to use my leisure time (what there is of it). I know she doesn't intend that, but that's how it makes me feel, and I've told her that. This of course makes her angry and makes her swear never to try to help me with my depression again. Which would be cute and even funny if it weren't for the fact that her mother is so screwed up, and her relationship with her mother is so screwed up, that every other relationship she has, including ours, is poisoned by it to a greater or lesser degree, although she refuses even to acknowledge this fact, much less act on it.
So I blog after she goes to bed or on my lunch hour or whatever. And so it goes.
But there's another sense in which I am not an extrovert at all: By and large, I'm not a people person. You know how the liberal-arts major, graduating into a crummy job market, attempts to mask his lack of marketable skills by saying, "I'm a real people person!"? Well, I'm not a people person. Most people, in fact, piss me off, although I seldom act on that feeling one way or the other. In spite of the fact that I spent my adolescence suspecting that there was a really cool party somewhere that I was missing (and in spite of the fact that I attended a lot of really cool parties and even threw one or two), I've always been happier with one or two really close friends than a whole pile of casual acquaintances.
This has become a bit of an issue as I deal with my depression. My wife thinks it would be good if I got out more, spent some more time with other people. Her two specific suggestions in this regard so far have been: 1) Go play volleyball at our church at the weekly open-volleyball night; and 2) join a Rotary Club.
Now, #1 actually makes sense, in the sense that I played volleyball in college -- intramural, to be sure, but copiously and very competitively. I'm not much of a natural athlete, but I had almost a 30-inch vertical jump in high school and college, and even though I couldn't slam-dunk a basketball, I could sky, block and spike with the best on the volleyball court. The downside to this is that I've been badly out of shape since my first child was born and I stopped exercising regularly.
And you'd have to know me to know how little interest I have in joining a Rotary Club, or the Civitans (I'm too old for the Jaycees, thank God). Nothing against those organizations, but I'm not for them and they're not for me.
No, what I'd really like to do more of is read (I read zero books, zero, during the first year after our second child was born), write and blog. That's it. But my wife worries because she thinks that these activities, if not antisocial, are not gonna help my depression and might even make it worse. I think it's possible she's right but not likely.
The way she has raised this issue has struck me as patronizing, as if she thinks I'm too stupid to know how best to use my leisure time (what there is of it). I know she doesn't intend that, but that's how it makes me feel, and I've told her that. This of course makes her angry and makes her swear never to try to help me with my depression again. Which would be cute and even funny if it weren't for the fact that her mother is so screwed up, and her relationship with her mother is so screwed up, that every other relationship she has, including ours, is poisoned by it to a greater or lesser degree, although she refuses even to acknowledge this fact, much less act on it.
So I blog after she goes to bed or on my lunch hour or whatever. And so it goes.
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