Maelstrom

It's been a really strange week, with a mix of eager anticipation about finally shaking up my routine and paralyzing fear about shaking up my routine. I was hoping to talk to my boss about an idea I had, but.... well, here's what I posted on a message board:

*sigh*

I'm about to try to bring this to a positive resolution by approaching my boss about going part time and off-site. I think that will address most of the frustration that I feel from working here and free up a good deal of time (and loosen some geographical constraints!) so I can do more things I want to do.

However, I'm a little scared of this conversation too, even though I'm emotionally prepared to accept the outcome all the way up to getting terminated. So it's taken some emotional effort to prepare for this conversation....

TWICE so far this week! And my boss still hasn't shown up in the office! Grrrr. How can I get this stressful conversation behind me if I can't even find him? Perhaps I should just send a resignation email. Arrgh.

So that's what's adding most of the stress in my life. I totally forgot to show up for a shrink appointment on Monday despite four Google Calendar email reminders! I was so wound up thinking I might have that conversation on Monday, and then so relieved when it didn't happen.

Last night I happened to make a sarcastic comment to my Mom to the effect that, "Of course God wants us all to be miserable for a few decades then die." At least I think it was sarcastic. My point was that society acts like we have a moral imperative to just keep clawing away at something we hate, in my case in a town I despise, and that for us INFP types that's just bad advice. But it still comes wrapped up in all sorts of normative statements from well-meaning but wrong-headed ESTJs.

Mom replied something about how I need to be more grateful for what I have, which is probably true but still set me off as a total invalidation of my self-expression. At that point all hell broke loose and I just reacted out of anger. I'm not proud that I treat people like that but it still gives me a lot to think about. Is my problem that I don't wake up every day all happy-go-lucky about a job that sometimes feels like torture (not lately, mercifully)? Does being thankful for life mean that I have to just suck it up and pretend to like where I'm living? Apparently, to people who think like Mom, it does.

I was just born ill-adapted to the human race, and that's all there is to it.

It's back

That same depressing ennui has returned. My mind is just so understimulated right now. I feel like I'm just voraciousy running around the Internet looking for something, anything, some bit of novelty to hold my interest for 15 seconds and get me that much closer to the end of the day. It's awful.

I am trying very hard to make progress on the informational interviews. It's a little hard, though, because I feel so burned out by 3:00 pm that the last thing I feel like doing is chatting with someone during my breaks. But it's really my only hope for a ticket out of this hell so I'm trying to be good about it.

Why won't my counselor let me just quit? I have five figures saved up in my rainy day fund / poker bankroll now. Probably not enough though. You can never have enough. You must continue pursuing more until you die. That's why you're human, ADHD, and INFP, so you can fucking be miserable until you die.

To reward you for reading this nonsense, here's a cool link someone posted on GlobalChatter, a list of different people's self-assessed job satisfaction by type (although it seems to know I'm INFP and give me only those, hmmm): http://www.typeandculture.com/typeresearch/ .

The value of meeting other INFPs

As I mentioned last week I need to blog here more when I'm not desperately unhappy. Actually, having a blog as an imaginary friend to help you cope is probably healthy, if a little scary when I put it in those terms. But I'd like this to be more, something more generally interesting.

I want to share more good resources for INFPs. So far the one I've used most frequently is a really excellent Facebook group called INFP's Unite! It's really been remarkable to meet so many people who see the world the same way I do. I joke that it's the first time I've been on a message board where I wasn't the one making the long and involved posts. And I'm about to get into a verbal sparring match with a communist who feels my brainstorming about the idea of a company run by INFPs is "repulsive". What fun!

There's a pretty active INFP message board at Global Chatter: http://infp.globalchatter.com/messageboard/ . As far as I can tell, that site sets a cookie when you first visit to make it really hard to view any message boards other than your own type, so perhaps you should visit your own type if you're not INFP! But I haven't gotten involved there yet because I can imagine how much time I would spend.

I joined the mailing list at http://list.ambertides.org/listinfo.cgi/infp-ambertides.org , but then it frustrated me because the subject lines of the posts aren't marked. I really just need to set up a proper Google filter for those posts but I'm lazy.

Meeting other INFPs has been incredibly helpful to me. Actually it turns out one of my Web freelancing contacts is also INFP -- he announced this by asking, "Do the letters INFP mean anything to you?" which gave me a chuckle -- so we had a good talk about career stuff after that.

Career counseling session.... err, V: Winnowing

Yesterday was my fifth phone conversation with Debbie my career counselor. I would have previously labeled this session 4B, meaning that it was the second half-hour piece of the fourth hour out of the six that I've paid for. However, we only went for 15-20 minutes before she assigned some work for next time and ended the meeting, in essence declaring it a success. So I guess I'll go back to just counting the sessions normally, using Roman numerals to signify this switch. I'll also try to track where I stand in the six hours of meeting time; this session was from 3:30 to 3:50.

We were able to finish early because of four words I uttered, words that don't come easily but are always sincere: "I'm ready to commit."

My last several tasks have been about narrowing down this immense list of careers that I think I would enjoy. It's plainly impossible to pursue everything, or even a good slice of everything. For this fifth session my assignment was to do a fair amount of research on some of my top options, which had the practical by-product of forcing me to allocate my time among them. So I made out what I called my "visceral" top six:

1. College career counselor
2. Market researcher
3. Professor of org. behavior
4. I/O Psychologist
5. Non-profit manager
6. HS career counselor

I proceeded to look through job listings and other resources for each of these six, but with a strong bias toward those at the top of the list. I scribbled my findings into a Google Document, and Debbie and I perused my research job by job during our phone conversation.

As we worked our way down to the bottom few, it became clear that I was really just going through the motions. I'd emotionally attached to the jobs at the top of the list, actually the one at the very top of the list, so it seemed fruitless to invest a lot of time in pressing forward on all of them. So I said it: "I think I'm ready to commit to the top career on my list, college career counseling." And apparently that was a good answer, because we talked a bit more about how to move forward, then wrapped up the call after 20 minutes.

Even now as I type this entry, my MBTI "perceiving" trait is flaring up in full force. I feel almost guilty for ruling out the ones at the bottom of the list. What's wrong with being a non-profit manager?, I'm asking myself. Nothing, of course. The whole purpose of this exercise is that nothing's wrong with the 2nd or 5th or 100th choice. I just can't pursue everything at once.

The next step is to figure out what degree is most helpful for pursuing these jobs. Since there's no obvious right answer, or at least I can't find it on the Web if there is, I'm going to need to contact people in this field to talk about how to break in. In essence I want to keep two steps ahead, thinking both about school and about how to build relationships to help in my job search after school.

But at least I made a decision. I think I should feel proud.

Metaphor

Imagine this scene. You're in high school shop class -- I've never actually been in one of these classes, but I can imagine what it must look like from TV or somewhere -- and the class is practicing drilling holes in a board. Each of your peers is sitting merrily, two to a desk, each with a drill and a piece of wood.

Only, you don't have a drill to go with your board. You have an Intel Pentium computer chip, not the newest model, but a pretty good one. And you've got to figure out how you're going to drill a hole in that wood.

Miscellany / So what’s your story?

I’m struggling even more than usual to concentrate today, for a couple of reasons. One is that one of our co-workers left the company. She was pretty much the person here with whom I most identified, and the operation was six people, so it’s hard not to let that distract me.

Secondly, I had a conversation at lunch that really confirmed and even expanded my sense that I work on a site without a clear purpose. Perhaps it’s just a communication gap, whereby the boss has never clearly expressed the goals for this site. Or perhaps those goals and strategy really don’t exist, and the plan has always been to “Just put up a site on that domain and see if anyone shows up.” At any rate, this gets back to the stuff about me being MBTI intuitive. If I don’t know that there’s a bigger plan, then it’s really hard to motivate myself.

I have my fourth of six career counseling appointments on Wednesday. I think I'll beg my counselor to please please pleeeeeeease give me permission to quit in good conscience!

I’d like to use the blog as a means of communication with the adult ADHD community, and to learn about other people’s experiences. On one Web analytics blog that I love, the author makes a point to end each post with one or more questions. I don’t know if I’ll do that all the time, but I’d like to get in that habit.

So what about you, Dear Reader? What brought you here today, and what’s your experience with working life as an ADHD or INFP or merely jaded and frustrated adult? Or conversely, what makes you happy about your working environment? Let’s start a conversation in the comments.

Why software isn't the worst possible career for me

In a message to a fellow INFP approaching career change, I wrote down a few thoughts that I think are worth posting. The premise is that I like some things about my present field, software development. In fact I like just enough to keep bringing me back to it, even though another career would probably be better suited.

As long as I'm learning something new, actually software is kind of cool. I can think to myself, "Wow, so THAT's how that works!" But when it comes time to plow my way through coding something that's not new or innovative, I lose patience very quickly and have no focus....

Making a change is hard and risky. I've been just unhappy enough to blame specific bosses or to otherwise think that my next experience in software will be the one that fulfills the potential to excite me. Now I realize that it's far more likely that I just need a career change.

Of course it hasn't helped that every time I've contemplated a career change and attempted to act on that contemplation, something really bad has come out of it:

• My disastrous experience marketing for the "Christian" college in which a rather sadistic boss fired me after a few weeks despite the dean's (her boss's) assurances I had nothing to worry about.
  
• My entry-level social services job, where I realized that individual contributors can't do much in that field without at least a masters.
• Applying to business school with the idea of specializing in non-profit management, only to have my star recommender disappear on me leading me to give up the whole thing in disgust.
• That abusive "ministry internship" that had my boss, a missionary whom I had earlier respected, screaming at me never to do ministry.

So much negativity. Sigh.

Therefore, it's repeatedly seemed easier just to shut my mouth and plod on through with the software work. At least I know I possess the skills. I just don't possess the motivation, not for more than a few months at a time.

It's hard to have faith that this time, the transition will be smoother.

A fellow INFPer, Meyers-Briggs prayers, and more!

For work I'm learning about Google Analytics, and that's lead me to start checking these metrics on my own site to see who's out there reading this blog. One great thing GA lets you do is see those search terms that lead people to your site, and by running those same searches you can find some fun and quite relevant content.

Apparently a couple of people have found my blog partially using the search term INFP, which is awesome. Hi there, folks. One of the searches also led me to this post: cybette's blog: INFP = ADD = Depression. Very interesting stuff, and I like her hypotheses about different reasons why our personality type may correlate with depression and ADHD, especially this one:

So what causes depression? Stress (among other factors). Feeling the need to "fit in" a world dominated by ESTJ/SJ's, or at least a world where ESTJ type is encouraged (many U.S. presidents are ESTJ's, including George W. Bush). Also, a lot of gifted and creative kids are mis-diagnosed with ADD, simply because they are misunderstood.

Count me shocked, shocked!, that GWB would show up as a J. Anyway, it's very interesting stuff.

She also cited short "prayers" for each of the 16 MBTI types. Here are a couple:

• INFP: God, help me to finish everything I sta
• ENFP: God, help me to keep my mind on one th -Look a bird- ing at a time.

Pretty much, yeah.

Tell me what would make you happier -- no, tell me what I want to think would make you happier.

Imagine this scenario: [Anecdote removed. Although losing my present job wouldn't be a terrible setback in the long run, I'd prefer not to risk it or make myself subject to blackmail by getting too specific here. The point of the story was, the boss asked for some feedback, then embarrassed a person who gave it in a meeting because she gave not quite the precise feedback he wanted. This struck me as counter-productive and frankly rather detached from the big picture purpose of trying to improve morale, but hey, I'm not a manager so I don't get these things.]

Back in my naive days, I used to think that senior managers got to be senior because they possessed more of a big-picture view than the rest of the staff. Perhaps this was just wishful thinking on my part -- I'm MBTI iNtuitive, remember, which is a poor word choice by Myers and Briggs. They should have said big-freakiN'-picture. So perhaps it's self-serving to think that senior managers are supposed to have a big-picture orientation much like I do. But it has a certain logic to it. You'd think that the big boss would need to develop the broad strategy for the whole organization, and delegate the details to the specialists. Incidentally Strong listed "senior executive" as one of my Top 10 fitting careers, so I don't think I'm totally on the wrong track here.

But come to find out, there are probably plenty of people running companies who so get caught up in the details that they don't care much about the big picture. I can't imagine why running things makes them happy, but apparently it does.

Who knew?

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.