If you’ve seen me publish on WordPress before, you’ve also seen me publish about personality systems before!

I’ve been studying the MBTI since I was a teen (maybe earlier, if you count how my older sibling introduced me to the stuff when I was in elementary school). My training right now consists of a lot of self-study–forum surfing, article digesting, video replaying, you name it.

I’ve also gotten professionally typed multiple times, and each time the typist, I felt, captured different parts of me, but not my true essence. As they say: “hard to do in an hour,” right? Additionally, the URL you’re at now belonged to my typing business in another life. I never had any customers, but I guess it was the process that was important.

I decided when first getting into the world of psychology that I wanted a comprehensive understanding of humanity, because as a high schooler, something awakened in me. I wanted to know all about other people, even while being very introspective and inward-facing myself. MBTI, though, in addition to being a way to stretch myself gently intellectually… was a crutch.

An obsession? Maybe. I have a soul-eating hunger for knowledge, though only for certain things, at certain times. And the study of the MBTI and its sister systems hit just at the right time: when I felt I didn’t have a compass. I knew who I was and why I was doing it, for the most part, and I tried exceptionally hard to separate my self-understanding from that which I gained from Jungian concepts.

Why I did this is simple to me, but may not readily make sense to a lot of people in the thick of becoming self-aware. In my view, one should understand themselves using their own skill first, in their own way. Other people’s systems should come secondary.

In further explorations of the archetypes derived by Jung and his offshoots, I will aim to take this understanding I gained of myself and outside frameworks forward. I heavily endorse offering comprehension of others where they’re likely to be understood, and how they’d like to be framed. Taking old data and reworking it is perfectly fine; it’s how we get innovation. But understanding the basis from where we sprung is rewarding to me because I’ve learned, even in my pursuit of newness, the value of following consistent (and timeless) frames of reference.

On this blog, which is a continuation of many years (10+, nearing 15 at this point) of self-study, you will find my observations of the types from as humanistic and realistic a perspective as I can make it. Typology to me is a living theory, and shouldn’t be a myopic lens through which we view ourselves. Humans as they stand today still know each other through a relation of self-reflection and how they meet into the rest of the natural world. And that’s where the beauty of personality systems comes in.

I haven’t just studied MBTI, though. There are ideas I’ve dipped my toes into, although I can’t claim the same level of proficiency in them at the time of this writing. MBTI is just that “kind of sticky” that gets you from the moment you walk in the door. Moving to other “psychological rooms” is difficult; and I’m lazy, so that’s why I’ve never done it effectively.

Writing this blog though, maybe that will change. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read this post if you’ve gotten all the way here, and hope we can start a fabulous journey together exploring type and soul.

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Featured image by Matúš Kovačovský + video created with Google’s Gemini Claymation Explainer.