How would you describe your personality without referring to MBTI, Enneagram, etc.?
I think much of this will be a bit miserable, because I'm on a downswing at the moment. And if you can tolerate it, please read the whole of this before replying to the one part you got to that annoyed or offended you.
Cynical and hopeful in equal measure. Uncompromisingly inconsistent and filled with the worst qualities of humanity. Self-loathing and intensely lacking in the kind of confidence that can only be described as 'useful ignorance'..as in..I lack that. But oddly sentimental, easily influenced and essentially one of life's bit-players.
I'm a side character in an episode of Law & Order, for a pop-culture reference. I appear, explain a bit of expository dialogue and then am killed off, or vanish forever. Frightened of being the worst, so attempts to understand and curtail those "in the moment" blow-outs.
In every sense I am fighting against what comes naturally to me, because it never helped me growing up and was no way forward. I still have the same emotions but I have to spend time suppressing them as much as possible in order to function normally.
On the other side I make for good, superficial company as I only talk about the real stuff here. Generally I'm affable, talkative (to a fault) and unthreatening. I occasionally upset people when that real stuff comes out, because no one is really strong enough to handle it.
I don't like conflict, though I don't shy away either. But I can't stop that it causes nightmares in my sleep and nausea in my waking hours.
Inner world:
What makes you the most happy and most sad in life? What effects you the most with any response?
I don't think there is such a thing as an inner world. I think that's something we try to rationalise out of our emotions in order to justify the misery of our actual lives.
I'm mostly sad that so much of conscious experience is like sticking your head above the sea, with your face still in the water, and pretending you can breath. That for all our blind cheerfulness over our achievements, we still stay locked in a limited nature. As long as we are comfortable, individually, we don't give a fuck about anybody else. And not just materialistic or physical comfort, emotional and psychological too. Morality and ethics are often very conditional.
I'm almost never happy. I experience joy and can get lost in a moment once in a while, but happiness is something that people have turned into an acquisition. I suppose I like painting my miniatures, the movement of a brush in precise motion allows me to forget everything else and experience the true power of ignorance. Ignorance is hugely important by the way, people always attach it to conscious, civilised issues of social concern and become disgusted by other's lack of knowledge. But on an individual & psychological level, it's vitally important for the delusional well-being of the individual. Every time you are happy, it's because you've forgotten (for a brief moment), what normally concerns your thoughts and generally makes you unhappy. I enjoy happiness with friends, doing like-minded tasks and activities. I like lunches and get-togethers, though not too many people please...15 maximum if possible.
I have a huge difficulty with being open about how I feel, though I am falsely expressive person and so my reaction to what effects me most is hard to gauge. I might say nothing, or I might attack the person.
Generally I dislike misrepresentation, being misunderstood even when I've explained in great detail and precision what I mean and distorted perceptions. Like how I've worked in jobs where the dunning-kruger effect and the peter principal met in an unholy match of horrific delusion, with people who thought they worked incredibly hard even when it was objectively measured and proven that they didn't, while simultaneously trying to throw people like me in front of the steam-roller.
What is your inner world like when you are alone? What do you think about or do?
No such thing.
I think about anything that happens to hold my attention, though there are some patterns. I think about my failings a lot and how to correct them, I think about how to influence people to understand themselves better when it comes to their flaws and problems. I think about neurology. I endlessly repeat situations as a simulation against future issues.
I largely eat, paint and do college work.
What do you hold as most important to you personally?
That I do the least harm I can manage in my life and leave without causing too much trauma to others. Not least because I know I cannot expect most others to do the same. Most people just indulge their worst behaviours and justify it with how it feels and then create elaborate mental constructs they can hide from themselves in < there's your inner world for you.
What kinds of things imprint on you the most strongly from childhood? Memories, emotions, experiences, details, moments of realization, anything...
Constantly being upset. Being hit a lot. Being shouted at a lot. Having stuff taken off me if I even made one small mistake. No patience, no understanding, no insight.....just different kinds of people constantly trying to control and manipulate me in different ways.
That and poor health conditions, never being invited over. Asthma and epilepsy & constant visits to hospitals. Being unable to control my bladder when asleep due to nocturnal-seizures, creating a barrier of intimacy between me and others. Being hated at school. Being bullied and then being punished for brutally beating said bullies when I snapped. Isolation, loneliness, exclusion.
Complete lack of support for any interest or idea, or activity I enjoyed doing. I was always 'supposed' to enjoy something others wanted me to. There are other posts of mine on here about personal epiphany.
What kinds of information do you most easily remember? Is it details about the concrete environments, social interactions, intellectual ideas, your innermost feelings and world?
I remember certain intellectual ideas. I remember a LOT of poor social encounters and the emotions involved (though I do try to suppress it). I'm very poor at remembering facts and details.
What kinds of subjects or ideas fascinate you the most and hold your attention?
Whew..quite a few ideas and subjects. I have a layman's interest in a few subjects, most notably neurology, because I'm interested in why and how people function and how they get to be the person they are. It's what drew me to personality systems...even if they were disappointingly inadequate for any real insight.
I'm fascinated by the paradoxes and contradictions in people's natures. How people say and do different things without ever noticing how little their opinion of themselves matches up. The shallow ego-games people play to convince themselves of their own self-righteousness and arrogance.
Having said that...I acknowledge some of this is influenced by the way I feel. So I will level it out by my fascination with both the quick-change of sudden understandings and how a person can shift. And my interest in what I call the 'shift' to reality. And what I mean is how our biological framing of reality and it's input creates a useful facsimile of truth. Useful for our purposes, but limited. Probably the best we have, but painfully, eternally unrealised.
And the shift is between different states of being. A balancing act of degrees in existence, like having several different kinds of people on a team that balance each other out...not perfectly, but well enough to function without falling to pieces. Of course down the line states of mind shift and the team will fall apart, self-destructing, only to be reformed anew elsewhere. I think the universe undergoes this process all the time and we reflect this in our nature, which is why history keeps repeating and our memories are so short.
When the shift is too slanted, things fall apart. And this goes for the small, minute individual problems as well. Not every issue has to be talked out or spoken for a resolution to appear, often people can work things out for themselves and it is the nuanced, subtle and unseen processes that create that kind of understanding, not blunt force trauma.
It's also why our altruisms and cynicisms are generally incorrect if not entirely false. They are correct in the degrees of their truth, just not in the totality. That's why, for example, there are conspiracies and skeletons in every government closet...and blood...lots of blood. But if you were to be present at the time and get to the heart of it, you would realise that its generally just a bunch of people scrabbling to stay relevant or riding the wave of their own proselytising demagoguery. It's also why people can do unexpectedly kind things to one another.
It's an insane existence and it's ours.
Environment
How do you engage with the outside world? What do you do or think about when you are outside yourself?
No-one is ever outside themselves, that's not the purview of our consciousness. I'm cordial and friendly, though I can turn snarky and passive-aggressive if you really annoy me. However I'm working on just being aggressive and up front instead.
What kinds of environments give you energy and inspiration? Where do you like to spend your time?
Home, by myself, ideally painting a miniature, reading a book or listening to music. Everything else is a frightening experience.
How do you relate to change or stability in the external world? Which do you prefer?
I prefer stability of my best emotional states, for obvious reasons. But I desire change in my worst ones. Same applies to my surrounding environment.
I think that's what everyone really wants, deep down.
Relationships:
What are your general, social relationships like? Do you form many, few, are the bonds strong, weak? Do these make you generally happy or sad?
Mine are superficial, extensive but not something I keep up with so I lose a lot of friends. So weak bonds and these make me temporarily happy.
What are your most intimate relationships like? If you could describe an ideal intimate relationship, what would it be?
I've covered this in a lot of detail in other threads here, but I'm essentially in the paradox of desiring intimacy but not knowing how to obtain it. Not to mention I'm terrified of other people and their invisible motivations.
An ideal relationship? I've got no idea because I don't trust ideals and I don't think you should ever expect something like that. Idealistic thinking is essentially the ultimate arrogance of our species, to think we deserve or expect perfection from the world is just nonsense and completely unfair. I mean...do you expect an ideal of yourself in relation to others? And if so how often do you really uphold it?
I think most people are so wrapped up in themselves that they can't even fathom this contradiction, they just get defensive instead.
What do you require [edit: "require" is a poor word choice you can insert a synonym that works better] of other people when they interact with you? What lines do you consider deal-breakers when crossed?
No idea until I encounter them. Social dynamics are far too complex and changing for this to ever be a useful series of questions, sorry. It's not something I've ever considered.
I will say that people seem infinitely creative in the department of what I find abhorrent about them.
Miscellaneous:
In what situations are you most flexible? In what situations are you the most rigid or inflexible? What kinds of things are you particular about and what kinds of things don't matter much?
I'm always inflexible, but I maintain a conscious suppression of this urge in order to appear flexible and learn what that means.
This is another one I don't think about too much beyond what I've said above in this post. So there are lots of things I am particular about, but they are nebulous and relate to hidden aspects of people's natures. Because the problem is that you have to sift through what people mean, what they think they mean, what their unconscious is influencing them to mean and the medium of that communication.
Ethically I hold my values close to my chest and don't feel the need to discuss them here. Just know, you will see them in action in any real situation of import, but I think claiming to act at some point cheapens the act itself.
What other ways would you describe yourself?
I'm too exhausted to put anything else right now, maybe I'll come back if I feel better later.