Re: You're so much like me

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: : I don't remember being an emotional child. Like Zen Cowgirl, I studied the wildlife around my house. My mother tells me that I kept very much to myself--she says I could always entertain myself in quiet way. I learned to read at age 3 (although my parents didn't know about it until I got to kindergarten, when they were very surprised to learn that was the case). I've always been very secretive about my activities, for reasons that make sense to me, but generally not anyone else. When I was 13, my parents sent me to a shrink. They thought I was a little too depressed and eccentric for someone my age. They may have thought I was depressed, but looking back I think it was at a crucial time in one's development. I wasn't ashamed about being different from most people, I was more afraid that people wouldn't even try to understand me. I was on "mental health" drugs for about ten years. I've taken so many and had so many diagnoses that my head spins trying to remember it all-- : ~~~~ : My story and yours are similar, except for the last couple of sentences. I didn't end up on mental health drugs, but I was depressed and angry at feeling like such an outsider. Nothing I did seemed to close the gap between Me and Them; I was always going to be an outsider. I went through a phase as a teenager when I just threw up my hands and said, "okay, you want a freak? I'll show you a freak." I started drinking a lot because I could actually feel like I fit in when I was drunk. I was more outgoing, people laughed at my jokes, and I felt connected to other people. I did a lot of drugs for the same reasons; they removed the pervasive alienation I felt. Trouble was, I got to a point where everyone I knew was a drunk or a junkie, and I couldn't function outside that culture. : I went to AA for four years, but was never very comfortable with it--the 5 really began to reassert itself there. For the first three years I accepted what I was told about having a "disease," and went to a lot of meestings. Still, I spent a lot of time feeling like an observer, watching and taking mental notes, rather than an active participant, and avoiding the self-exposure, confession, and religious indoctrination that were expected of me. The whole AA doctrine made very little sense to me, and not believing in any kind of redeemer-god I was unable to swallow the necessary religious aspects of it. I ended increasingly depressed and anxious, surrounded as I was by people who insisted I had a lifelong, incurable disease, and that a recovery program that made no sense to me was my only hope if I wanted to live. Eventually, I left AA; I realized that I was going to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge if I continued to stick around. For six months I worked painting houses and reading, including material that went counter to AA's dogma regarding alcoholism and its treatment. Eventually I started drinking again, by my own choice, and have done so in moderation for seven years--counter to AA's belief that alcoholics can never drink again. I made a decision that I was not going to return to my old life, and have had no difficulty holding to that. : Once I realized and accepted that I was a 5, I started to see my life in another light. I felt more comfortable with the fact that I liked to spend a lot of time alone, reading or thinking, with little outside intrusion. From a feeling of being unable to fit in, I began to relaize that I didn't have much desire to fit in in the first place, and that being something of an outsider wasn't a bad thing. For the first time in my life, I was realizing that there was nothing intrinsically wrong with me, or my orientation to the world. : ~~~~ : : At the worst point, I was considered paranoid schizophrenic. I took so many antipsychotic drugs that I no longer wonder what catatonics think about-- I'll tell you...nothing. It's hard for me to explain this all in a coherent way because it is all so foggy in my head. Ten years of my 24-year life span have a dreamlike quality to them. I went to Cornell University after high school...they asked me to leave and get myself together because I had a "psychotic break." Nonsense! I was taking a handful (24 pills) of prescribed medication every day. They never even considered that the drugs caused instability. I'm still pissed about their incompetence. It seems like they should have considered that I was sane enough to have a 4.0... I'm getting to the point, though.. : : One day, I decided to stop taking the drugs. It's hard to say precisely, but I think I've always known that there is nothing wrong with me mentally or emotionally. That day I just stopped cold turkey. I remember saying to myself, "There's nothing wrong with you. Stop this before you suffer permanent damage." So I stopped...but I'm still an insomniac two years later and my memory isn't what it should be. Other than that, there really ISN'T anything wrong with me. : ~~~~~ : Your story is amazing--it takes real strength to make that decision in your favor when everyone else insists you're sick. We're supposed to trust authority, so long as it's not our own. : ~~~~~ : : The reason I tell you all this is because it is the very reason I've been so unsure about my type. For doctors to think there was something wrong enough with me to dope me up for ten years, made me consider my own emotionality. I've never felt overly emotional, but the doctors said it was so, so for a lot of years I believed it. I've since come to work it out in my head, to rationalize it all. I believe that if I could make sense of any of those ten years, I must be a 5. I lived a four life during that time, but not by choice. Needless to say, I don't believe in psychiatry anymore. : ~~~~ : I think psychiatry is in a comparable stage to medicine--back when medicine was practiced by barbers. I don't think it is concerned with mental health at all, really--mental control in service of the dominant culture is more like it. : ~~~~ : : I can't believe I'm actually writing this. I don't even know you people. I hope you can understand how this relates to the 4w5 vs. 5w4 conversation. I think I may have digressed a bit. It's all related in my head, and I hope I've conveyed it somehow. : ~~~~ : I do understand--and I'm glad you did write this. Interesting that you and I are female 5w4s who were somehow made to act as 4s--a more "desirable" type for females in this culture. I don't know if synewton (who is unsure of his/her type but thinks he may have a repressed 4w5 rather than the 5w4 he has identified himself as) is a man. This bounces off the earlier discussion on gender and type. Are 5w4 women and 4w5 men routinely pushed into acting on their "more acceptable" wing, rather than their true type?

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