When I was younger, I took the Myers-Briggs several times for different reasons*. That’s not the point of the post, so I will just say that I was consistent in three of the four letter. INF to the max each and every time. However, the fourth category, P or J (which I interpreted to mean a rules follower or more spontaneous), I scored exactly the same in each category. Which did gel with the way I self-idenitfied. Meaning, I did better with a schedule I made myself follow, but at the same time, I didn’t always follow my schedule. And when I veered, I veered wildly.
How does this tie in with neurodiversity? Austic people, on a whole, like schedules and habits. One common image of autism is the young boy screaming his head off because his routine has been disturbed. My brother was like this when he was a little kid. He was not very verbal for the first three or four years of his life, so he could only make his feelings known through screaming. If my mother didn’t follow the habits/routine/schedule that my brother had in his head, he would yell and cry until hee turned red in the face.
On the other hand, people with ADHD tend to be more spontaneous and easily distracted. There’s a meme of a person with ADHD talking about something a mile a minute and then interrupting themselves to say, “SQUIRREL!” Time is tricky, and people with ADHD are often surprised when time isn’t what they thought it was.
Why am I mentioning it? Because in the day to day, I am much more a rules and regulation kind of person. I also don’t mind eating the same thing every day (in part because of all my dietary restirctions), and I do the same thing over and over again.
However, there are times when I go off the rails and, say, move to the East Bay for a year to get my MA in Writing & Consciousness, which is completely out of character for me. Or when I ‘suddenly’ decided to get two black cats. K told me she was astonished when I went out and did it seemingly overnight, but I had been thinking and planning it for over a year.
This is how that looked like.
I started thinking about getting a cat when I realized that even though I was allergic to them, I really wanted one. I researched the best breed of cat for people who were severely allergic, which at the time was domestic short hair. There were the Rexes, but I didn’t like the way they looked. I went on the Petfinder website and looked at seemingly thousands of black cats. In doing so, I realized a few things. One, I wanted two rather than one so they could play with each other. Two, there were a lot of unwanted cats, especially black ones. Three, I did not want kittens as they were too much energy for me. I needed chill cats, plus, kittens had a much better chance of finding a home than older cats.
I spent months looking for the perfect duo. I honed in on two cats, Midnight and Shadow, who had been born with five brothers and sisters. They were the last two who needed to be adopted, and they were nine months old. Which is considered adult for cats. Their foster mother had written bios for them. Raven’s said that he was energetic, outgoing, and fearless. Shadow’s said that he was psychic and knew that I was looking for two cats. It also said that he was shyer/more skittish than his brother. I looked into his eyes and fell in love instantly. He looked so wise and all-knowing.
They were going to be at a PetSmart near me the next day for an adoption fair, and I considered it fate. Back to my previous point about K being surprised I had done it so suddenly. She was talking about it with her husband and mentioning how I had done it seemingly on impulse, but when she thought about it further, she realized that I had been talking about it forever.
How does this tie in with Taiji? And, yes, I’m talking specifically about Taiji in this post. Unlike yesterday’s post, which was mostly about Bagua. Like this. Yes, there are forms that we practice. And, yes, our warm-ups are done in a certain order. But our teacher is very chill about changing things up if need be. Also, she does not care if we make mistakes. In fact, she insists that’s a part of studying Taiji. In class today, she mentioned that a new student had told her she (my teacher) had made a mistake. My teacher was eager to know what mistake she had made. The student informed her that on the sheet of postures, it said “Play Guitar”, but my teacher had said, “Play the Guitar”.
I snorted because I could relate to the student, but I also knew this wasn’t even a mistake. The names are loose translations for the Chinese, and Chinese does not have articles (as we think of them), so Play the Guitar and Play Guitar are the same thing. Also, in Chinese, it’s not a guitar at all, it’s a pipa, but it was turned into guitar for Westerners. Taiji does not care about extraneous things like that, but I know how your brain can get stuck in a ‘that’s not what you told me!’ mentality.
There are certain forms that once you learn them, you can adapt them however you like as long as you stick to the Taiji principles. In fact, my teacher (and her teacher) are very excited when students want to make up their own forms. I joked about it (can’t remember which weapon. Maybe sword?) with my teacher, and she wholeheartedly supported me in doing it. Same with when I sent her a video of a fan form with the intent to teach it to myself. I liked to get her approval, and she said she trusted me when it came to the weapons. That really meant a lot to me.
I have more to say, obviously, but I’m done for tonight.
*I am not here to argue about the validity of the MBTI itself since that’s not the focus. This is just an observation from taking it so many times.