When I was in elementary school, around grade 6 or 7, the students in our class were all asked to participate in an exercise called the Meyers-Briggs Type Index test. After answering an inventory of several hundred multiple choice questions, the answers each of us gave were collated and used to place each in one of 16 general personality types, refined as a set of 4 dipole scales -- Introvert vs. Extrovert, Intuitive vs. Sensory, Thinker vs. Feeler, and Judger vs. Perceiver. I scored strongly as an INTP (Introverted iNtuitive Thinker Perciever). According to the makers of the test this meant, among other things, that I preferred being alone or with small groups of close friends over large groups and crowds, that I tended towards abstract thinking and the 'big picture' over immediate concrete experience, that I resorted to logic and universal principles rather than emotional or relational judgments, and that I tended to collect and communicate information in an open-ended way rather than systematizing, classifying, evaluating, or insisting on absolute precision.
Now, I'm well aware of the criticisms of the MBTI and similar personality-classification systems -- that they underestimate the number of aspects of human personality, that they sacrifice diversity and precision for the sake of measurability and reduce peoplke to a set of numbers, that they can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, there have been many occasions when I catch myself using my MBTI type as an explanatory shortcut for my behaviour rather than taking time to understand its deeper motivations or meanings; that for instance I have trouble socializing with unknown quantities because I am Introverted, rather than I am Introverted in part because I have trouble socializing with unknown quantities. These critiques certainly have merit and one would be foolish simply to brush them off.
But right from the moment I received and read my test results and through the rest of my life, my MBTI classification has been an invaluable tool for me, in the same way as other 'labels' like Genderqueer, Bisexual, Satanist, etc. This is because being given an MBTI type was one of the first times I was explicitly told that being the way I am -- thinking, reacting, and seeing things the way I do -- is not 'wrong'. It may be abnormal (statistically, INTP is one of the less common types) but it is just one of the wide variety of ways of being human; that in fact a vast swath of the population, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, shares a similar outlook on life and way of relating to the rest of the world. That my difficulties making friends and relating to others, my intense anxiety in situations calling for sustained or intense social relations, my tendency to 'miss the trees while daydreaming about the forest', my difficulties with empathy and procrastination and lack of organization -- these were not 'syndromes' or signs of some fundamental lack within myself, and that they also came with compensating areas of heightened ability which others might lack -- intense reflection and absorption in abstract ideas, comprehension of systems and logical structures, a nuanced and fine-grained comprehension of subjects others might give only the most cursory of attention. That in fact I was not the inferior of others who seemed to fit into the social world like a round peg in a tailor-made hole, and that in many situations I might conceivably be their superior. That my brain was not in fact broken (or rather, perhaps, not as broken as my life and experience had implied to me that it was).
This was my first brush with the concept of neurodiversity.
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