“You have to take this personality test,” my daughter insisted as she went on to catalog all the friends who had taken it. “Terra's an Idealistic Teacher and Chris is a Provider. I want to know what you are.”
“I'm your mother,” I mused.
“No, really, it'll be interesting,” she prompted.
Hell bent on getting me into a categorized box I figured she needed to prove to herself, once and for all, that there was a certifiable reason to have what she envisioned in her youth as a spacey hippie parent who ignored schedules and dragged her off to rehearsals with mom's crazy rock band. The same mom who flew in the face of conventionalism, teaching her daughter to question everything and rebel against what didn't fit her principals. But even more importantly, she needed to affirm to herself that she was entirely different from her mother during any time in her life. For sheer entertainment, and to appease my own curiosity, I Google search the supposedly respected Jungian Briggs-Meyer personality test.
I settle into a comfy couch position with a glass of libation to loosen deep thought and cogitate through hours of questions and essays I figured it would take to determine one's personality type. However, there were only about 75 questions, all of which overlapped and repeated – reworded in different ways to ensure answers were consistent, so in actuality, it seemed there were only really 10 questions that kept looping.
Unexpectedly, none of them had to do with maternal relationships, paternal envy, or even the desire to beat up your siblings – although it did ask if I would rather spend quality time with my family or go or to a party. I wondered if my answer would lower my rating and classify me as exceptionally boring or just weird because I enjoy my family, all of whom love to party.
The survey was a true or false and yes or no simplification and didn't even require a single thoughtful sentence. But how can the entire western world's personality be defined and organized into only four groupings and several subcategories determined by questions that potentially have multiple answers depending on variables of situations, moods, moon cycles or bad days?
“You are almost never late for your appointments: Yes or No?” What if you don't have appointments? Does the daily pilgrimage to Camp 4 Coffee count as an appointment and are you late if you're the last in your neighborhood to roll out of bed so you get there last?
“You feel involved when watching TV soaps: Yes or No?” Is Battlestar Galactica a soap and if so does Cylon sympathy count as involvement?
“Strict observance of the established rules is likely to prevent a good outcome: Yes or No?” Rules? What rules? Although, Crested Butte has its own set of rules – you must wear a costume for the Al Johnson Uphill Downhill, weasel out of work for powder days and furiously play outdoors in the summer – and if you don't follow those rules you won't have a good outcome or a good time.
“You often contemplate about the complexity of life:Yes or No?” Does negotiating the crawl home down totally darkened streets after a slurred conversation and drooling into PBRs at Kochevar's qualify? If so, then my town is full of deep thinkers with complex lives, which means Buttians are all average by default… but only while still in town because anywhere else, they’re off the charts.
I completed the test and emailed the ratings to my daughter.
"I am totally weirded out. This is a revelation,” she sent back.
“What's so weird?” I panicked, thinking someone finally had a verifiable reason to lock me up at last.
“These tests are pretty accurate and used all the time by professionals for analysis and companies for job placement,” she sounded astonished and confused.
“So what's the problem?”
“We're exactly the same type personality… and it's a rare one, quite uncommon, less than 2 percent of the population are in this category and we're the same… you and me....” Her worst fears had manifested... she was more like her mother than she had wanted to believe and was probably questioning: what if my mother was right about everything?
The next day I call my own mom, “Hey mom... you got a few minutes to take a quick test?...”
Wanna play? Take the Jung Typology Test online at humanmetrics.com. and see which box you fit into – and how far the apple fell from the tree.
2 comments:
Love your writing style, Dawne!
The apple and the tree: my son also very much like me but shh! don't tell him!
Just took the test - pretty spot-on.
You've hit the nail on the head once again. But I came up with a new hypothesis about brain disfunction last week while leading tours for the wildflower festival (at which nametags were sadly absent). When I was a kid, they used to fog the neighborhood several times each summer with pesticides against mosquitos (that was in Illinois)....hence, my brain has since been mush. Or at least the name recall section was zapped!
Kathy D.
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