This essay was originally published in “New
Plains Review: A Journal of Social Commentary,” Fall 2012. (http://www.libarts.uco.edu/english/newplains/currentissue.htm). Thank you to Sister Hazel (http://www.teamsoundwave.com/sisterhazel/index.html) for allowing me to use the lyrics to their wonderful song.
Change
Your Mind
If
you want to be somebody else
If
you’re tired of fighting battles with yourself
If
you want to be somebody else
Change
your mind.
Songwriters: Ken Block, Andrew Copeland – Sister Hazel
I used to be an introvert. Then I was an extrovert. Then I was an introvert. No wait – I used to be confused, and now I
accept myself. Sort of.
For a year, I’d been a prisoner in my
own home. Because of the treatment I was
taking – chemo, radiation, surgery and more chemo – I wasn’t allowed out in
public. I couldn’t go to the grocery
store, couldn’t visit relatives, couldn’t go to church. The few days I managed to make it into work,
I posted a sign on my office door: “I have a compromised immune system. If you have a cold or fever, please call me
instead of coming in.” A simple cold
could kill me.
Finally, my doctors gave me the green
light to emerge from isolation. My
resistant white blood cell count had finally come back up to the point where I
probably wouldn’t die from somebody else’s flu.
The first thing I thought was, “I want to listen to some live
music.” And there it was – an invitation
from my office manager to buy tickets to a Sister Hazel concert.
Oh, sure, I’d heard of Sister Hazel, the
hometown boys made good. My hometown of
Gainesville, Florida, is famous as the birthplace of Tom Petty, lead singer of
the Heartbreakers. But Gainesville had
also produced the sprightly band, Sister Hazel, named for a woman who ran a
local homeless shelter. Their big hit,
“All for You,” made it to number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. So I wasn’t totally unaware of their
commercial appeal. I thought it would be
fun to see them in person. And we had
great seats, second row front.
What I didn’t know was that Sister Hazel
produced infectious, happy, quirky music, that their fans, called (don’t laugh)
Hazelnuts, knew every lyric to every song and sang along like a choir as they
performed, and that the lead singer for Sister Hazel, Ken Block, had lost his
brother to cancer when they were both teenagers. I didn’t know that he’d started a charity,
Lyrics for Life, that benefits pediatric cancer research. I didn’t know that alone on the stage, he
would sing an acoustic song to his brother that night, and that when he put his
hand to his heart and then reached to the ceiling of the amphitheater I would
feel such a sense of belonging.
I’m not a big joiner. When I was a teenager, I had my MBTI profile
done for the first time. My particular
type was INFP. For the uninitiated, this
stands for Introverted, Intuition (N), Feeling and Perception. The INFP’s are usually quiet, not
detail-oriented, tend to feel more than think, and tend to be perceptive as
opposed to judgmental. In other words, I
was, as I realize now with some distaste, “sensitive.”
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
is a psychological assessment test that measures the way people perceive each
other and how they make decisions. Using
the theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, a mother/daughter team of
psychological theorists, Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, developed a series of
questions that pinpointed specific personality types. The Myers Briggs Type Indicator is now used
for everything from team building exercises to Human Resources studies. Supposedly, there are no good types or bad
types – just different types.
As I recall, the teacher who evaluated
me in high school made a particular point of mentioning how far into the
introverted scale I was, and how interesting she thought that was since I was
from a large family.
What the teacher didn’t know, what
nobody at my school knew, was that at the time I was suffering from extreme
depression. I was good at hiding this
condition in public. After all, I was
the oldest of five children, and determined to set a good example for
them. Back in the sixties and early
seventies, very few middle-class parents acknowledged, let alone treated, the
depression their children experienced.
Certainly my parents didn’t. They
were pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstrap people.
Their heroes were football coaches and basketball players, big strong
guys who didn’t whine about their problems but went out and did something about
it. Come to play. Play to
win. Winners never quit. Quitters
never win. It ain’t over till it’s over. Yadda yadda yadda.
As my fevered seventeen-year-old brain absorbed
Nietsche, Ghandi, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, as I learned the sad lessons of the
Vietnam Mothers’ marches, cried over movies such as Billy Jack and Easy Rider,
my parents organized touch football games and played softball with the
neighborhood kids. I tried not to
participate. I was obsessed with world events, war, assassinations – Bobby
Kennedy, Martin Luther King – and a couple of boyfriends who went away and left
me lonely. It’s no wonder I decided the
world was a sad place and I was a sad person trapped in it. Thank God I didn’t drink or take drugs.
Because
of this outside turmoil, I began pushing the furniture out of my bedroom and
living with all the ascetic ecstasy of a monk.
When the contents of my bedroom consisted of a mattress on the floor, a
bare light bulb and a wall of books, my mother had her pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps
talk with me. I told her I didn’t wear
boots. She told me if I wanted to change
my life, I should just change it.
So I told her I was dropping out of high
school. She said not a chance. So I applied to college at the University of
Florida and was accepted, at seventeen, with no high school diploma. My adventures in college are fodder for
another story. Let’s just say that I’m
firmly convinced that introverts should not be allowed to go away on their own
at an early age. We frequently discover
that the big family we couldn’t wait to get away from was really the anchor
keeping us from blowing away!
Years later I was re-evaluated by a
potential employer using the MBTI. They
didn’t hire me. I’m not sure what they
was looking for, but I obviously wasn’t it.
The evaluator told me I was an introvert, but not heavily
introverted. By this time, I had
recovered from my depression by doing exactly what my parents told me –
pulling myself up by the bootstraps. Having
children helped. Having a husband
helped. Having a career helped. Frankly, I was too freaking busy to be
depressed. I was a workaholic who filled every spare minute with necessary
busyness.
And then came the cancer. The tumor was large, the cure extreme. I was told the treatment would half kill
me. That’s a scary way to start out a
chemo and radiation regime. And my
doctors were right. Things were tough for
a while. But I had so much support. My husband stood by me, stepped up to the
plate (that’s right – I adopted those sports metaphors – what about it?) and he
took over all the household chores I normally did. He nurtured my now college-age children, took
care of my dogs and cats, shopped, cooked, cleaned – even mowed the yard – all
tasks I normally did. Things fell apart
a bit, but overall, we survived.
ved.
My mother came and stayed with me when
the chemo and radiation side effects got bad, and again while I was
recuperating from surgery. I lost about
forty pounds in three months. Mother
browbeat me into eating. She was a
trooper, a combination coach and cheerleader.
She urged me to eat a spoonful here, a spoonful there, made me get up to
walk when all I wanted to do was lay there and die. She did my laundry and helped me to the
bathroom and read to me and talked to me and generally encouraged me. A high school teacher, she made me watch a
video of one of her former students who had overcome great odds to play
professional football. She celebrated my
life and that of my children and brought me back from the brink of death.
My doctors were stellar. My surgeon was the chief of surgery at a
major medical center. My radiologist was
world-renowned. My oncologist was famous
for his sympathetic care and his snarky humor.
My chemo nurses were saints.
My friends stuck by me. My children took me to treatments, sat by my
bed, held my head while I vomited. My
son even told me he wasn’t going back to college. Boy, did I nix that. It
ain’t over till it’s over. Quitters
never win. Winners never quit! I told him he would break my heart if he
didn’t return. We mothers have no shame
when it comes to the welfare of our children.
A few months ago, I retook the MBTI as
part of a training session at my job.
This time I was told I was an ENFP.
Wait a minute, an ENFP is extroverted. They are motivated by being around people and
gain energy in social situations. That’s
not me, is it? Yet they have all the
other characteristics mentioned above - they prefer the abstract to the
concrete, they give credence to personal
preference over objectivity, they feel rather than think, and they like to keep
their options open. In short, I’m an
overly sensitive person who likes other people instead of being a recluse.
When I asked the gentleman who gave the
test how I could have changed, he said the first person who did the test and
the second person who did the test were obviously wrong.
I told him I thought he must be
wrong. I am quite clearly and have
always been an introvert. Not only am I
an introvert, but everyone who around me is the exact opposite. I know my extroverts, by God! I’m the wife of an extrovert, the daughter of
extroverts, the friend of extroverts, the parent of extroverts, but I am an
introvert. It’s who I am. It’s part of my being. So what the heck is this extrovert
stuff? The Human Resources evaluator
said the results were quite clear. I
said the results were quite wrong. He
said they weren’t. He’d been doing this
a long time. He was sure.
Okay, so my question is, can you change
personality types? The psychologists say
no. But can overcoming depression, looking
death in the eye, can being saved by the persistence and love and tireless
energy of those who care about you cause you to become someone new when it’s
all over? Have I adapted to my new type
so convincingly that I test differently than I did as a teenager? Well, yeah!
This ability to change types doesn’t
seem to be a static thing. A few weeks
ago, life threw a series of curves my way.
My daughter became hysterical, convinced she’d flunk her nursing
boards. My son broke up with his
long-time girlfriend and wouldn’t speak to me.
(Huh? What’d I do?) My parents were mad because I hadn’t
called. I had a dust-up with some people
at work. Even what I did for fun took on
ominous overtones when the people in my writers’ group started fighting with
each other. Bunch of introverts! Jeesh.
About this time, out of curiosity, I
took an MBTI test online. Did I change
again? Is that why everything was
haywire around me? Now, I know this
isn’t an accurate representation of type.
Some psychologist or career counselor or HR person has to administer the
test or it isn’t official. But still –
this one showed I was back to an INFP.
For that day, for whatever reason, I’d become an introvert again. Perhaps all the angst in the lives of my
fellow sufferers was just too much for me.
Perhaps I merely needed to recharge, to drift away to a cave somewhere
so I could hibernate until it was time again to face the world of men, women,
children and pets.
The psychologists always say, there is
no right or wrong answer, there is no better or worse type. But then they carefully guard the information
about what type you are. Why is this? If it doesn’t matter whether you’re an
introvert or an extrovert, a thinker or a feeler, why don’t we all take the
MBTI in grade school and use it for predicting future success? You, you thinker, you must become a
scientist. You, you feeler, you shall be
a nurse. You, creative one with no
common sense – poet!
Actually, that is what the proponents of
MBTI would have us believe, that they can foretell what would be the best
career choice for us. It seems to me the
MBTI doesn’t make allowance for change.
What about the skinny guy who gets kicked off the basketball team and
grows up to be Michael Jordan? What
about the kid who’s too small to play football and ends up playing for Notre
Dame? There are a million ways to change
your circumstances. Can you change your
destiny? Of course. Can you change your type? I maintain you can.
I think there are those among us who
don’t fit the categories. We are
mutants. Perhaps we came from another planet and were dropped off in our
parents’ extroverted wombs on the sly. We change as circumstances compel
us. I am a creative type, but when I was
broke and had to get a better job, I learned to do bookkeeping and accounting
so I could get promotions. Though I am
quite clearly not an analytical person, I ended up with analytical
responsibilities. I didn’t do this for
fun – I did it for love of family.
Now that my children are graduated from
college and launched into the world, I long to go back to my more natural
creative inclinations, something I had to give up when I worked fifty and sixty
hour weeks. I go to concerts with my
husband, read poetry at an alternative bookstore, hobnob with creative types,
and generally live the lifestyle I should have stuck with when I was twenty,
before responsibilities overwhelmed me.
If an MBTI specialist had said to me
back then, you should be an artist, an entrepreneur, a creative soul, would my
children have been as happy as they are now?
Would I not have been seen as a selfish, soul-serving idiot to give up
their welfare for my own? Yes, I might
have been successful. But they might
have resented me. I might have become a
success or I might have tried and been a failure. Should I have given all this up to follow my
dreams, to live out my MBTI-appointed destiny? As it is, I lived my life the way I was forced
to play it out, and that has been a good thing.
The thing is, when it comes to science,
life so frequently gets in the way. I
shouldn’t be here. I had a large,
undiagnosed tumor that required killer treatment, and I survived, thanks to the
people who cared for me. The fact that,
in a darkened auditorium, a singer touched my heart was strictly an
accident. The fact that, in that
hometown auditorium, a group of strangers sang a song that seemed simple but
made so much sense – just change your mind – seemed to be
less a coincidence than an operation of fate.
I stopped being a workaholic. I
stopped putting my career before my life.
I stopped saying, “I’ll watch that concert next week. I’ll see that movie next month. I’ll make that trip part of the five-year
plan.” There is no five year plan. I’m a cancer survivor. Today is what there is.
Whether
I’m an introvert in an extrovert’s skin or an extrovert in an introvert’s skin
doesn’t seem to matter on a day-to-day basis.
They say knowledge is power. When
it comes to type, I think power is power.
You do what you must. You take
the shot you’re given. You make the play
you have to. And then, one day, you get
a wake-up call and realize that maybe your fellow humans aren’t so bad. You start going to parties, visiting friends
and family, joining groups. Everyone is
surprised. But you are not. After all, no one wants to be typecast.
END
Recent Comments