Liberation

Sorry I’ve been out of touch recently. The past few weeks have been rather stressful, and I’ve been focusing all my energy into fighting those proverbial battles.

All this stress was actually leading up to a moment for when I was out of town. I returned “home” to Texas for a few days, attending a leadership training conference for my synagogue.

Now, if you’re anything like me, the moment you hear any of the aforementioned words (leadership, training, conference), especially combined together in a title, you roll your eyes sighing in passive aggressive protest.

However, this particular conference intrigued me the most out of all the ones I’ve ever attended.

Why? Because the main training source material was StrengthsFinder 2.0 from Gallup based on the 34 CliftonStrengths.

I have a friend, who’s life story is similarly intriguing. He wanted to be a pilot and live in Latin America, but became an attorney instead after majoring in philosophy. As such, he’s one of those friends I often muse regarding the meaning of life with since he’s done quite a lot of traversing, never really knowing where he was going nor what his purpose was. (And just for posterity’s sake, he’s doing quite well.)

A while ago, he mentioned this test to me as an alternative to the Myers-Briggs, which I was quite keen on at the time. He discussed how his results were, to him, extraordinarily accurate, far beyond any personality assessment he had ever taken.

For him, the results were liberating because it discussed how he loved words – discovering, utilizing, and playing with them. He is quite the aficionado, and I’m always trying to reach his astute level of eloquence. Now a few years later, he’s embracing this strength, a combination of his raw talent and personal investment to hone it into a skill, and he’s becoming a locally well-known, aspiring poet.

Thus, whenever I saw the title of the book as I pulled it out of my conference material bag in my dim, muggy hotel room, I knew precisely what was in store: liberation.

Grant you, I’ve been on this journey of self-discovery for quite some time. However, I do think this might be a catalyst not solely for myself, but others with me along my journey. Only I digress.

As I laid between the stiff sheets in the same hotel room, I began taking the lucrative test wondering what secrets I might uncover. Throughout the questionnaire, I feared, though, my exhaustion and clouded judgement would skew my results as I kept selecting neutral answers.

And then the moment came.

Input. Connectedness. Ideation. Intellection. Strategic.

Bizarre answers, I thought at first, but I did not discredit the results. Sure, I jokingly said to my friends attending the summit with me I wanted to retake the test since mine seemed so random. Only now after a few days of seminars, thinking (which happens to be the Intellection strength), and further reading about my specific strengths (Input and Ideation), I find they are indeed the hoped for results.

My first thought after further contemplation about my results was, “Maybe I’m more self-aware than I thought?” Then I was further shocked because only one of my results was about people. That accompanying thought was, “Shouldn’t I have more strengths which involve people since I’m a Myers-Briggs Feeler?”

However, I’m not solely a Feeler, and neither is Feeling utilised in my primary/dominant function. I’m an INFJ. That means my dominant function is my Introverted Intuition. When I took this fact into consideration as I reread through the more detailed descriptions of my results, I was stunned. The accuracy of my results is extraordinary, just like my friend.

One example, which I laugh at, involves my first strength, Input.

During our training, we discussed how often times our strengths manifest naturally, but due to it coming from our unconscious behaviour, others more easily witness their manifestation, sometimes incorrectly viewing them as characteristic flaws. They termed these manifestations as “counterfeits”. For Input, the counterfeit is usually identified as “packrat”.

Since I was about five- or six-years-old, I remember my mother calling me a packrat, in a somewhat loving, doting way as only a mother can. I even distinctly remember the first time she called me a packrat because I didn’t know what the term meant, needing her to explain.

I sat in my father’s home office, the cool wooden floor beneath my bare legs. The heat of summer poured through the windows with the afternoon sun. Lost in a reverie, I sat with my purple bag from the Fort Worth Zoo gift shop with a picture of a zebra on the front, its contents dumped onto the floor between my sprawled legs.

Bones and fossils.

They were my treasures from the Fort Worth Science Museum and other adventures in the Texas wilderness. It was what helped sparked my love for all things ancient, and cultivated in me a desire to one day be an archeologist, a dream which I have since given up for other pleasures.

There in my mind, I held one of these artifacts in my tiny hands, surveying, observing, memorising its lines and curves. In the distance, I heard a voice call out to me and looked up to see my smiling mother, who stood with her hands on her hips giggling at me. “You’re such a packrat!” She exclaimed, her sweet smile never fading.

“What’s a packrat, momma?” Kneeling down to look over my treasures with me, she explained,

“It means you collect things and have a hard time throwing stuff away.”

“Oh, is that bad?”

“It can be if all you’re collecting is junk.”

What happened or was said next, I don’t recall, but I remember that term since becoming an endearing nickname my mother would call me from time to time, and one my sister and sometimes father would use out of spite.

Obviously, that also means my collection of fossils and bones was not my only one, nor that it ever went away. I added to it and others as long as I recall. I still am.

As they were describing different ways we use these strengths in training, the first being “under” as in it is “under developed”, I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “Like how I collect things in my refrigerator?” which he laughed at knowing how right now, at this very moment, there is still a pie (maybe two) in the back of my fridge from Thanksgiving.

Of course, I don’t just collect food waste. I have papers strewn throughout my apartment, books by the dozens, and dried flowers preserved on display in multiple vases. Don’t even ask about my computer’s hard drive. Yet this strength is not merely a collection of things, as I’ve come to learn. It is also, primarily, the collection of knowledge, of information. Hence why I’m so good at trivia games, especially Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit.

The weird thing about all this, though, which I mentioned to my friends during dinner, is I never imagined something like this would be described or called by some licensed psychologist or scientist as a strength. I just thought I was quirky. Very quirky.

Furthermore, as I was reading about my specific strengths in the book we were given, different descriptive words popped out at me like “muse”, “musing”, “intuitive”, or “intuition”, which I found confirming to my own sense of self-awareness.

I have often thought just because I use those words, especially to describe myself, it did not mean that is what I inherently am or do. Reality is not based on the boundaries of my own arbitral experience. However, it seems this once, I was correct.

I must have chosen those words because of their own inherent meaning which spoke to something which was intrinsically a part of me.

As I said earlier, when I took into account my dominant personality function being Introvert Intuition, not Feeling something, all my strengths made complete sense. With the exception of Connectedness, all my strengths are primarily strategic thinking functions, which I’m apparently what they call a thinking introvert.

Additionally, I realised all the strengths were “quirks” I discovered about myself when I started writing about…ish years ago. Quirks which manifested and were further cultivated through my writing whilst strengthening my writing. In other words, writing is the outlet, the medium which utilises all my strengths simultaneously, and I had no idea until now.

So where does this lead me? Not sure, it’s all still relatively new, but my wheels are definitely spinning. I’m excited by the implications these new discoveries have, and where it could be leading me. As stated before, it’s liberating. I feel as though I now have proof to be the “me” I knew was always beneath the surface, I just wasn’t confident enough others would accept as “real” or “authentic”. Sure, I have a lot more to learn, to study so maturity and growth can follow, but now I have a language and other tools at my disposal to communicate my discoveries.

Ultimately, I feel change is near, as though its winds are stirring in the distance, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.