NF and ST

I am back to having lots of pictures to post and things to say about them, a dead picture dumping computer, and a funky USB connection on mine. So no pictures and stories, and a reluctance to say things without pictures. Booyah I'm a committed blogger.

Whatevs. I'm going to post without pictures. Bleh.


My husband and I are quite familiar with the personality type system of Myers-Briggs. We studied it a little in our pre-marital counseling, and before that, we had several friends who were quite into it and sucked us in to their world of personality analyzation. While it is a flawed system, it gives some very helpful pointers when trying to understand other personality types.

I am an ENFJ and my husband is an ESTJ. I could go on for a very long time about all the differences that this indicates, but let me illustrate one of them with the happenings of this morning.

Ryan blogs (currently more frequently than I do) at Something or Nothing At All and this morning he posted a little poemish thing that made me cry.


The Glass Wall

Every day at work, I see it.
I walk by and peer into a world that I can never reach.
I truly want what lies behind the wall of glass.
However I am not one who can get through it.
No, I must stand happily on the other side.
Others all around me can find what they want when they look through the glass.
What is it about me that prevents this for me?
Every day I walk passed it.
An invisible wall that separates employees from their dreams.
I wish I could put a crack in it, maybe more. Maybe nine million.
What do others have that I do not?
I want what lies behind the glass wall.
Oh how much it would make my life better.
But alas, it can only remain a dream.
Nevermind. I do have a dollar in my wallet! Time for a Kit Kat!

 

"Oh my poor Ryan!" I thought. He has a severely frustrating job with many challenges and opportunities to practice patience and humility. He rarely complains about it or comments on how it affects him. I was amazed that my rarely introspective darling had just expressed his feelings and frustrations at all, much more so that it was online, and almost in poem form. Such clear imagery! The "glass ceiling" of thwarted career advancement had been changed to a "glass wall" that showed his yearning for a impossible to achieve career change. He felt that his dreams were beyond his grasp and had to merely watch them lie untouched day after day. Then he snapped out of his melancholy and was back to his characteristic self and joked that candy could make anything better. 

 

 I am incessantly analyzing how I feel or what I think about things. Ryan does not. Ever. Well extremely rarely. I felt so horrible that things were bad enough at work that he would talk about how he felt about it. 

 

When he got home I told him that I was really impressed with his articulate and poetic way of expressing himself, that I shed a few tears over his plight and that my mom and I prayed for him that afternoon as a result of this post. I thanked him for thinking about how he felt and for sharing it. Thinking I was being sarcastic, he laughed and said "Oh yeah that took me about five minutes to come up with." I was seriously impressed and said that I felt bad that things were so bad at work. Then he realized I was serious and asked me what on earth I was talking about. 

 

Turns out he was writing about literal glass walls. The ones on a vending machine. That whole deep introspective delve into his soul was about a  vending machine. Yep. We are two different creatures, but it sure makes for some laughs. 

How would YOU have interpreted that?