Surprise Yourself

Sagittarius, for whoever may be asking. Gen X, Middle Child, Cisgender, Year of the Monkey and AB+. 161, or 145, depending on who’s testing. 24BMI, 34D, Brunette, Autumn, Pear, Introvert. Pommie, or Sassenach, if that’s how you put people into your boxes.

There are two kinds of people in the world: People who need everyone pigeonholed, people who don’t care, people who deliberately break out of every stereotype assigned to them, and people who ponderously overhaul the existing frameworks, building in more boxes to try and contain all possible misfits.

And then there are sixteen types of people in the world, because your husband decides to join a ministerial networking organisation, and both of you have to get Myers-Brigged so that they can properly quantify your joint potential…

It wasn’t my first time. I’ve met Myers-Briggs in various contexts, formal and informal. For a couple of decades they defined me as INFP; now it has changed to INTP. A tendency to act according to my feelings has morphed into a habit of thinking—or a thing I have always done has been recategorised as thinkish rather than feely. These days it’s done digitally, online, so it’s a robot that’s transferred me from one box into another and closed the lid on Exhibit FMJones. The people who use your MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) are usually extroverts who use words like “extrovert” and “introvert” as verbs as well as nouns, and who cannot accept that the MBTI system is anything other than infallible.
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It’s all done very politely. You’re meant to feel validated by the idea that you can still have worth even if you have different personality traits from the people on the Zoom meeting who are there to Discuss your Results. They smile, strenuously, but you can see the dismay in their eyes as they repeat the mantra: Every personality type can display useful functionalities. Even introverts, they carefully avoid saying aloud. In the end they decide that if your husband is a very pronounced extrovert, his gifts can balance out your, er, well let’s say gifts too, because we’re all very diversity-conscious here, and we tolerate ALL SORTS like a box of Bassett’s Liquorice. 

I’m not saying it’s invalid—not exactly. I’m saying it’s arbitrary, and it’s an artifact of whatever dimensions we decide are important, and whatever we consider is normal/neutral on each line. Maybe everyone should try a personality test or two, just to pick up a general idea of how the important people view us. Followed by a gullibility test, just to make sure we aren’t swallowing anything whole and defining ourselves by someone else’s framework.

I’m suspicious of placing any trust in the boxes we use to sort ourselves into types—whether historical or pseudo-scientific. Is “Oh you’re a Virgo” benign or dismissive? Does “Well I’m a People Person” acknowledge mutual tolerance or justify behaving in an intrusive manner? If you see a social media post offering to define your anxiety type, your neurodivergence or your social intelligence level, do you click through, and do you believe the result? Does a belief in the result affect subsequent self-image and behaviour?
According to the discipline of General Semantics, it does. The relationship between language and reality is two-way. Language describes reality, but there are ways in which our reality conforms to the language we’ve used. We define a characteristic or a trend, and in doing so we validate or stigmatise, become or avoid. Call me a thinker, and I will do more thinking; call me courageous, and I will try to live up to the word. Tell me I’m an introvert, and, mysteriously, I feel less drawn to social situations.
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Does General Semantics offer any solutions to the limiting effect our semantics can have on our realities? Well, not an easy one. It’s called E Prime. It’s an exercise in non-definition. You speak or write English but without any form of the verb “to be”. No “is”, “was”, “were”, “are”, etc. Suddenly you can no longer say you are or want to be something. You can’t say you are an artist, an expert, or an author. You can say you painted certain things, you have attained a certain level of expertise, or you’ve written something. 

Similarly, you can’t say someone is an introvert, or an annoying person, or a hero. You can say that they have shown certain tendencies, or have done certain things. They have danced with wolves, or stood with a fist. Something, I can’t quite say what, remains wide open, and suddenly everyone looks more nebulous, less finished, more soulful, untidier, harder to sort into boxes.

I will admit this: E Prime is just as artificial as the zodiac, the MBTI, the Generation grouping or whatever other Sorting Hat you’re accustomed to invoking. What’s more, it feels a lot more awkward at first encounter. But it does something the others don’t do: it de-crystallises our view of personality and what it means to belong to human society and to Earth.
I will not call myself a General Semanticist, but I sometimes have a go at writing in E Prime. It kicks a whole lot of bad writing habits—passive voice, overdependence on adjectives, general tropiness. You can’t say it WAS a dark and stormy night; you have to say what the storm DID in the darkness. Forced to work real verbs in the absence of the verb “to be”, you find yourself writing something that sounds poetic, compelling, almost mythic.

I don’t often do it, because most of my stories include dialogue, and you have to model dialogue on the way real people talk. I probably have a couple of nature-themed micros in E Prime floating around the literary side of the Internet, but this is the only story in E Prime that I’ve got—and, if you look carefully, you’ll find at least one flaw in its E Prime purity.

Let me recommend an antidote to the Standard Personality Test: Write a description of yourself in E Prime. No “to be” verbs: no am/is/was/have been/etc. Describe the things you have done, and confess what the events of your life have done to you. Owning the talents, admitting the flaws, accepting the open-endedness of it all, you might just surprise yourself.