Danger, danger

Feelings of worthlessness and self-pity are strong today. Trying to trust God with it.

CC2: Answering a lot of questions

I haven't blogged here for several days, for a couple of reasons. Mostly it's that I'm less inclined to write when I'm not suffering, and I've been working hard on leaving my career dissatisfaction to God and coping with the suffering (but not denying it!). That seems to be going relatively well.

Likewise, moving forward with the counseling has really helped. I still have issues, and indeed, the counseling is only confirming my impression that I'm not in the right career! But at least I don't feel so desperate to make something positive happen right away. I feel more inclined to trust that I can wait it out, because I know there's a plan in place to improve things. Some of my fellow Christian friends might see that need for a plan as a lack of faith. Perhaps.

And finally, despite the inadequate feedback where I work, I've gotten better at picking up on small bits of positive feedback. That makes me feel better about myself and feel valued here. Even though it really isn't a good long-term fit, it's a lot better for people like me to go to work every morning when we feel valued.

So then... about the career counseling.

I had session #2 yesterday, and to be honest it was more about Debbie reading my results to me than anything. I took the Meyer-Briggs Type Indicator, the Strong Interest Inventory, and the 16PF. I come out as:

• An INFP on the MBTI (strongly iNtuitive and weakly Introverted, moderate on the other two).
• SAE on the Strong
• I can't tell you what on the 16PF, but it certainly makes me sound emotionally unstable.

One of my favorite contrasts is that the 16PF gives me low potential for leadership (3 of 10), but one of the others indicates strong leadership potential. I think that reflects my ambiguous view of leadership: I love to motivate others to a common goal, but only if it's an authentic goal. I have no inclination whatsoever to be a bureaucratic middle manager, or for that matter senior manager.

I've been reading up on INFPs. I love this INFP profile from Typelogic. However, this one from personalitypage pissed me off with this graf:

INFPs do not like to deal with hard facts and logic. Their focus on their feelings and the Human Condition makes it difficult for them to deal with impersonal judgment. They don't understand or believe in the validity of impersonal judgment, which makes them naturally rather ineffective at using it. Most INFPs will avoid impersonal analysis, although some have developed this ability and are able to be quite logical. Under stress, it's not uncommon for INFPs to mis-use hard logic in the heat of anger, throwing out fact after (often inaccurate) fact in an emotional outburst.

However, the more I think about it (and about how MBTI defines "thinking" versus "feeling"), the more I realize why I'm so challenging. I'm not a typical F! To the contrary, I'm very good at logical thought. I just grow less enamored of it with each year of life experience, so I value logic only in situations that call for it. I think I come up F because I'm becoming more of a person who values feeling, even thought I'm still very capable of thinking.

In fact, I think this cuts to the heart of why it took them so long to diagnose me with ADHD. I've always done superbly in school, whereas most people like me can't focus on school. I guess it's a great reminder that four letters don't define who I am. It does remind me of my evil plan, with my best friend in college, to blow up the Greek system and replace it with 16 co-ed frats based around the MBTI.

In other news, a friend sent me a link to a careers-related blog, which led me to this fascinating NYT article about law and medicine being less prestigious than they used to be. It's a great point; in general our society values stability less than in the past. Maybe I'm well-positioned to gain in prestige as a vagabond -- as if prestige meant that much to me anyway.

Struggling to make sense of it all

On one hand, I'm told God wants me to learn to be content despite the circumstances, to just trust him, to rest in him, to accept my time in the desert no matter how long it may be, and never despair, and never question that this time of not being where I want or doing what I wish is meant for my own benefit and refinement.

On the other, it seems God made me like this, ADHD, restless, easily bored, and I can't stop wondering if this restlessness is to keep me from getting complacent with second- or third-best, to make me aspire to excellence rather than mediocrity. And that means trusting the intuition God's given me that, when the time comes to make a change, it's time. I'm not getting any younger, and youth isn't forever.

Does this make any sense?

General grumpiness

How ass-backwards is it to make the development staff into receptionists and customer support agents for your store because you don't have anyone else to answer the phones?

I'm trying to be less critical of stuff at work, and when I started I accepted the occasional interruption as just part of working for a small company. But it's getting a little out of hand. I'm already easily-distracted as it is; when I process three or four store returns in a day, I start to feel more like a CSR whose just writing a little code in his spare time. And of course, that's not the way to get your website developed.

Then again -- no one actually reads the site that I'm working on anyway, so it seems like all my effort spent to add features is sort of fruitless. "Hey, everyone! We have live notification of games that you haven't signed up for! We have automated women's basketball rosters even though no one reads those pages!" It's like we're majoring in the minors. If you want to redeploy tech staff, redeploy us to marketing. We need marketing. Bad.

OK, now that that's off my chest....

Last night I had a total meltdown. Going over my litany of failures with the counselor earlier in the day was a bit taxing on me, and it really got to me late last night. I ended up losing about 1 to 1.5 hours of sleep because of it.

Also, my resentment over living in my hometown, at least 100 miles from any sort of anything that I enjoy, got to me, beacuse I'd planned to go to a concert tonight but can't because I'm too busy with shrink, counselor, career counselor, and CTS doc. I really fucking hate this place.

("But God has you there! Be happy!" It's hard for me not to believe that God has me here because he enjoys making me miserable for reasons that are beyond my theological comprehension. I realize that trials and tribulations are supposed to strengthen us. In my case, they just beat me down and take away my will to live.)