What Leading Si Means
Si
Truly, what is it? Here is my take.*
Sensory impressions. Intense sensitivity and accuracy with colors - add Fe you get a love of color. And form. And nice textures. Sensuality. Intense sensuality ~ e.g., showering multiple times a day just for the pleasure of the running hot water and cleanliness and bodily feelings, or hanging onto silky blankets, "breaking the fabrics in" for years for stroking, and so on. Wide variety of experiences of perceived quality when it comes to food, disliking poorly prepared foods or offensive ones. Sensitivity to the texture of foods. For example, I don't like eating scrambled or fried eggs because the textures are too bizarre to me. Scents and having strong fussy preferences. Being able to smell someone from 30 ft away if they have not bathed. Sensitivity to modern lights with unnatural frequencies such as LEDs on fancy cars that hurt your eyes, or sitting under fluorescent lights in the office that can make one feel sick and nauseous. Extreme sensitivity to temperatures hot or cold ~ not being able to hold that new cup of coffee the barista just served in a paper cup because the cup AND the cardboard corrugated sleeve are insufficient to protect you from the sensation of heat. Your brain just signals, "burning! burning!"
Having a sense of the atmosphere of a room or a place, possibly at times borderline psychometry-like. For example, once I was terrified in a high school friend's bathroom and didn't know why. I couldn't use it without someone being in there with me. Then I found out from her that someone had died in the bathtub - had drowned. For whatever reason, I could still latently sense the negative emotional residue from the experience. And I have other uncanny stories about feeling emotions in a room which have already been passed but not dissipated. It's like a type of energy consciousness present. A shaman or neopagan would take sage and do a ritual to smudge the room in such instances. I realize that is speculative and will not be believed by many, but it's true nonetheless. It is a phenonema part of the consciousness puzzle, and my particular type's areas of sensitivity and talents.
Spending a lot of time remembering. Reminiscing regularly more than thinking about the future, and wondering what could be done differently to work with pressing circumstances from the past. Remembering details back even to infancy, early childhood, that on average most other types forget. In my prime, having an excellent memory for things like rattling off all the lengthy alphanumeric part numbers of various forms that I had worked on that day. Remembering with photographic vision what I had written in my notes while cram-studying for an exam. Being able to recall feelings from emotional events even if it happened very long ago, being so impacted in body it takes a long time if ever to "get over" it.
A love of sexuality but an equally prudent concern for health and cleanliness. Refined sensibilities in this area yet not necessarily soft. High standards. Wide variety in quality of sexual experiences depending on partner. Feeling a wide variety in quality of experience even with the same partner because of the amplification of nuances others would gloss over. Severe critic of porn as mostly unprofessional/not good enough even if they DID get paid. A fear of contracting a disease if too promiscuous just giving into hedonism, so a strong discipline about managing and controlling ones own sexuality accordingly so as to not disrupt daily life. Also a strong discipline about eating habits ~ keen sensitivity to what food cravings exist and why, what nutrient needs are, and rarely eating beyond this.
Sleep. Can sleep much more than the average person and be quite happy about it. Would feel guilty for other conditioned reasons if slept all day though, even though it is wholly easily possibly. Really sensitive to sleep chemicals and what stage of sleep I'm woken up from. If awoken at the wrong stage, can feel physical pain in my body for hours trying to adjust as a consequence.
Beauty. More sensitive to aesthetics than average and expecting everything in my environment to be clean, beautiful, balanced, well-organized. Having high physical standards in romantic partner according to my sense of beauty, even finding most common models to be not quite attractive enough to be on display. Spatial skills ~ good fine motor skills. Artistic ability for realistic and surreal drawing and painting. Often I could scan a puzzle box image, grab a piece of a puzzle 1000 pieces large, look at the piece and the picture and place it on the table in the exact place where it belongs whether pieces adjacent connect or not. I use to amaze my IEI Mother with this. Image-valuing. More interested in how pretty the fine motor skill handwriting and charts I draw/create look in science class than the thinking behind the homework problems. Finding aesthetics in abstract concepts like higher mathematics. Good navigation abilities around my space akin to never really getting lost with respect to sense of direction. Having little to no need of a compass or tech nav system. Able to build things per design by just looking at the pic without need for directions, like Legos, toys, my Celestron telescope. I have worked in spatial mechanical structural design because of being able to visualize and turn things around in 3d in my mind and sense the weight and pressure of things etc naturally using my common sense. I enjoy layout work. I can cut my own hair with enough mirrors and without need for instruction in a variety of styles. I have cut other's hair well without training too, even wavy hair on older men and with a shaver.
Squeamishness. I am very empathic towards others emotions and experiences and immediately feel them as my own, for this reason avoiding violent entertainment as well as violent visual news. If I am emotionally upset I vomit easily from stress. If I experience a change in temperature too quickly from room temperature to freezing, I start gagging. I can't clean horrendous messes. I neat a space that is efficient and easily manageable in tiny ways to clean often through smart personal routines. I do not appreciate others creating enormous messes and expecting me to clean it up. It might take forever and the final result would not be up to my standard compared to starting over with a new, clean space and just maintaining it with perfection to begin with. I clean as I cook too. Any spill is quickly wiped up, even if everything ends up taking a bit longer. I can't stand other people's messes nor clutter. I create and enforce strong rules for myself about managing my own possessions so as not to collect more than I can conveniently manage without too much strenuous effort.
Gym class. I was horrible at gym. I am a terrible runner. When I'm in my best shape, I am a very fast walker. I was/am excellent at dance, enough to go professional.
This was written stream of consciousness and is not the most logically organized set of data but it'll do for now. Maybe it will help others understand what Si is.
Discrepancy applications compared to current socionics popular data: Notice for example how DarkAngelFireWolf69's attribution of the INTPs clean habits and the ESFPs dislike of keeping pets for cleanliness reasons is actually an Si valuing trait, not Se. And not Ignoring Si either per Model A. I would not want to keep pets for the same reasons - too much to clean up after, pet smells and hairs, probably not worth it even though I grew up with pets...
* including much of what others DIDn't say about "introverted sensing"
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