(i love Andrew bird!!)
Question #50: what is something that scares INTPs?
Is it:
A. Emotions
B. A quadratic equation with incorrect information
C. Waking up in bed with a Billy goat with glowing green eyes next to you.
D. things with more legs than needed. Ie, a spider, or a centipede, or a starfish.
Honestly, I'd say none of the above.
A. I'm Fe, so I'm not the kind of person who can hold back my emotions or keep them under wraps. If I feel something, I like it to be voiced. If I keep emotions bottled up, I feel like I'm going to explode or something. They have to come out. I think sometimes people think that if an INTP doesn't emote a lot (which we don't), that they must be ignoring their emotions or not giving them their proper acknowledgement or something, and that's not necessarily true. This last weekend was a roller coaster of emotions for me (family reunion of sorts - *cough*) - it had some ups and some personal downs for me. Lots of emotions - but, just by talking about those things in a calm, rational manner with people
was me emoting. By talking about the weekend with someone, that allowed me to work through the emotions. If I say to someone, "This weekend was a bit sad for me for certain reasons" - I may seem like a robot INTP who "is hiding his real emotions" - but, in reality, that *is* me dealing with my emotions. Might seem stunted to an NF, but that is emotional to me. If I say I'm sad, you can believe that I'm feeling the emotion of sadness inside to a large degree. One time last year, I had to call a friend about an issue I was going through and I sobbed like a baby for about 10 minutes on the phone. And, it was really a somewhat trivial issue. It wasn't even something like the loss of a loved one or anything like that. It was an issue that made me feel like I had failed miserably. That I had let people down who had trusted me with a large responsibility and who I gave my word and my handshake that everything would be taken care of and I was unable to deliver. These "episodes" happen maybe once a year - I call it my "once a year meltdown". Other than those meltdowns, I deal with emotions all the time, it's just not in an NF type of way. It's just more of a talking through things.
B. Annoying, but it's not going to stop the earth from rotating on its axis - therefore, I can overlook it.
C. "Come here and lay down in the bed you little Billy goat. Yes, good billy goat. Now go to sleep."
D. Yeah, I'm not real fond of these things. Spiders get stepped on or crushed, centipedes get kicked into the gutter, and starfish are cool - although I really have no desire to touch one that is alive. I'd rather just wave to him.