Know Thyself Project - Sumay

This is my first personality project, or in this case, one of multiple personality projects as I have changed over time and find the need to update my understanding of myself. In past articles I focused more on summarizing Myers Briggs types. This was partly because I resonated a lot with a certain type, and because I wanted to learn more about others and have a system where I could start understanding people while knowing it’s a simplified and imperfect model. In this article I will be talking about characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, and friendships of the “Sumay” type.

For a while I’ve thought of myself as an INFJ, but some of the characteristics in the description don’t describe me as well as they used to. An example is sensitivity to criticism and prone to burnout which I think, in a sense, I’ve “grown out of” from experience of taking criticism personally, pushing myself past my limit and then thinking maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. More specifically I am not as strong for the letter F. I am able to understand others’ emotions, but others’ emotions don’t have too much of an effect on my emotions. I think that this can be described as analytical emotional intelligence where you can understand others’ emotions by analysing the situation they are in, what triggered them to feel a certain way, and therefore identifying the root cause. But you may not start feeling sad if someone else is feeling sad.

Analytical emotional intelligence does have its downsides because although you understand others’ emotions and why they are feeling them, not everybody wants an analysis of why they are feeling the way they are and how to solve the problem. Sometimes they just want a hug, or just someone to tell them “I'm so sorry you are feeling this way.” By telling them what is the root cause of what caused them to feel negatively and how to solve the issue, people may feel as though you aren’t realizing the emotional state they are in and then have their negative emotions amplified.

Also, when it comes to being empathetic and trying to make people feel better everyone has different ways of approaching it. People with analytical emotional intelligence I observe usually only make these conscious efforts when it comes to people they really care about and people they are trying to build long term relationships with. This is what I usually do, because most of the time the amount of energy it takes doesn’t result in what I would call a hugely positive result. Especially since you can spend a bunch of time making someone feel better, but they are always going to become sad again at some point one way or another. This doesn’t mean I don’t like helping people, it’s that I may want to do it in a way that can cause positive benefits in a scalable way, or something that is going to help long term as well. And I may get fulfillment by knowing I am having a positive impact while not necessarily being in contact with whoever I am helping.

My thought process is very different for the people I really care about and want to build out long term relationships with and I try to be empathetic with these people. Some people are empathetic with everyone they meet and I think this is a very good trait and is a trait that comes from how much fulfillment people get from personally helping people and creating a human connection.

I have many strengths and weaknesses, and I like to think of them as characteristics instead because they can play out negatively and positively in different situations. Many of the strengths and weaknesses I am pulling from the INFJ and INTJ types. What’s funny is that the INTJ personality has Independant in it’s Strengths and the INFJ has Avoiding the Ordinary in it’s Weaknesses. These are both very similar and I would say I resonate with it and it can play out in positive and negative ways depending on the situation.