Hi Eliza, and thank you for taking your time to answer my posts again. I had to think long and hard before answering because I just have no idea how to put into words what I have experienced while reading your response. I don't want to sound insensitive, I don't believe that I'm a brash person, so I hope you can take my answer as a polite try to create some distance between us. I totally appreciate your enthusiasm and eagerness to answer in detail! That was very kind of you to take a lot of time to do it. I think it benefitted me greatly, because I could see some pieces of the puzzle that were eluding me before. So in the name of science
, I want to say what I felt while reading, and again, please don't take it the wrong way.
Your answer felt very overbearing and like you were trying to see things in me that aren't there. When you were relating to me, I have in turn found it incredibly hard to relate back to what you were saying. In fact, I didn't relate almost at all. I was surprised a lot of times, trying to figure out how it was that you were relating to something I said, while yourself talking about something completely different and unrelated to my statements. Instead of feeling supported and like I belong, I felt misunderstood and taken for granted --like you just wanted to talk about yourself, using my descriptions of myself as a jumping off point for your own musings. I guess some of my vague statements are to blame, as they offer a wide range of interpretations but it felt mildly insulting to me. But that's fine! It let me find a new perspective on things.
As I said, I needed some time to think about the things you said. I find it helps me cool down when I write down what I feel and then edit it to sound reasonable to others (which, yes, makes writing posts very long. I think I spent over two hours writing this one). (How Fe of me.) I did that process here as well and came to a conclusion that it was a really great to react to your post the way I reacted because it showed me where my boundaries lie. It's probably not related to my socionics type much, but it is important to me to know those boundaries and respect them. I have trouble with that. So thanks for providing that experience! On that note, there was one statement that stood out most among others. Again, my reaction to it could be unrelated to socionics at all, but to my conditioning and psychological profile instead. But I thought I'd share it here in case someone saw something in it.
Maybe I'm overreacting here, I'm sure you had the best of intentions when writing this sentence but I'm so sorry, you definitely aren't seeing a whole pic of me. I think it would be a very rude thing to say to anyone because it's so objectifying, but regardless of social conventions, it touched me very deeply and in a very wrong way when I read it. Few things get to me like that. No, you're not seeing me. I tend to believe only personal interaction with someone can allow you to get to know the other person, and even then it's never going to be the full picture, no matter how many descriptions of themselves they give you. We perceive others through our own prism and we only see our reflections of the other person in us, not the person themselves. Yes, we can do a complicated thing like trying to find a type for someone, but we are unable to really see them in their entirety --that is already too complex for limited cognitive abilities of a human being. It's just not possible. I don't think people even see their own selves in their entirety. And that's totally okay. But in my mind, it's definitely not okay to say you see a whole pic of someone. That's like taking away what makes them an individual person, and bringing them down to an object that you can catalog and put away in one of the shelves in your mind. Sure, we all do that all the time, that makes it easier to live and interact with people. But hearing such a thing said openly rubs me the wrong way. Personally, I make these simplifications while still keeping an asterisk that says 'not really what you think they are' about every person I know.*
*Posting this whole paragraph makes me very uneasy because I'm aware it can create discord and hurt feelings. I thought of erasing it altogether but decided it should stay here, 'for science'.
I hope this didn't sound too blunt. I don't know how better to put it. Thanks again for taking all the time you took! It helped me see some things I couldn't recognize before.