Ms. INTJ

Somewhere in Genevieve’s Spastic Search for God 2023 (which is not necessarily YOUR spastic search for God, but, you know, I do my best to inform, entertain, and provide reading resources so you too can experience great joy should you choose to keep creeping on my life), I remember why I told Mr. Chocolate Brownie Thunder early on that God makes all of my dreams come true eventually.

It was, of course, because I had met my guardian angel.

Because I’ve always wanted to. Like St. Don Bosco.

Probably he was the Uber driver that the good, kind, wise Catholic CEO sent to me on the worst day of my life. Because, see, he taught me my past, showed me my soul, and foretold the future.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but like, if you want to know God, you gotta start seeing things through spiritual lenses.

Sometimes God sends you people to take care of you for a limited time and then you wave them away and pray for them.

In general I follow a policy of When you meet a rando person, chat them up because you never know what you’re going to learn about the world. These days I like to follow the rule of — How fast can we start talking about God? Anyway, I got in the car super exhausted, but he was super friendly, and before I knew it, we were getting along like a house on fire.

I had spent five months wondering: What is this dude’s DEAL? Because the CEO was like all three of my annoying, hyperprotective, overcaffeinated big bros rolled into one plus great dollops of Frenchiness and How soon can I hack his brain and figure out what makes him tick?

I’m nothing if not ambitious.

I remember thinking when I got there: I want to learn everything about this place from top to bottom and, well, on the last day, I did.

Over the course of an hour, this Uber driver told me all about CEO-ing, and I was like OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH that explains EVERYTHING and also: Dang, I could do that.

Also, he was a crazy, talkative, distracted driver like me, and before the ride was done, he had told me all about his previous accidents which he thanked God he had lived through.

OH SHIT. I HADN’T THANKED GOD FOR MY DELIVERANCE.

Rookie mistake.

Somewhere in there we started talking about personality types. I was like, Oh yeah I’m an INTJ which is the packaging label I’d been assigned on entrance to college. That’s probably what happens when you teach your daughters logic, argumentation, and an overwhelming fear of the world. There was a day I woke up and realized that eighty percent of my anxiety came from overprotective parents.

He started going on about how INTJ was the rarest in women, how smart and analytical I must be…

What’s so funny about that day is that everything was so tospy turvy — like Alice in Wonderland. All these older adults were trying to comfort me and give me advice and blah blah blah and I was just so not having it and exhausted and just wanted to go home and sleep and…

Anyway, told my driver about the meeting with the big man and his advice basically boiled down to: Go in there and be a manipulative bitch. And my reaction deep down inside was like: EW EW EW EW EW EW EW.

So.

Let’s play a game I like to call: Spiritual therapist.

What’s wrong with being an INTJ?

Hint: JUDGING.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

That’s a nasty one.

I also did this when an older relative handed me the third diagnosis I didn’t want. Your therapist’s job, after all, is to help you grow — thus, I had grown from one set of problems to another during college. But when this faux diagnosis came along, I realized: She didn’t have a doctorate, she hadn’t observed me at length, and I hadn’t asked for it. She sent me a breakdown of “what it feels like to have this diagnosis you, Genevieve, need” and my brain started autofilling: Oh, that’s where I lacked patience, oh, that’s where I lacked this virtue, oh, that’s where I lacked that virtue…

This is how I hacked my own brain. And my dad’s brain. And God’s brain.

Because, see, Daddy Wolf is also an INTJ.

Let me break it down for you nerds.

Anytime I had gone to my dad during that period and regurgitated all the reasons I was unhappy, he would listen for a short time (usually not long enough), take that data, analyze, KACHUNK it, and spit out like three pieces of advice.

This is how I ended up being given shit career advice multiple times.

Because, see, he didn’t have the complete data set. He hadn’t seen it all through my eyes. He didn’t know.

Thus, his output was crappy.

Only God has the complete data set. Only He is observing the room from above.

The day before the Agony in the Garden Conference Room, my mom gave me the best advice of all time: Genevieve, do not go speak to your father when you are upset. Which, frankly, I wish she had told me when I was sixteen, but anyway. The other day I was crying about something, he walked in the room and saw me and said: Oh, you must be stressed about money, and I was like *internal facepalm NO, NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS ABOUT MAMMON*

See, Daddy Wolf is the Fierce Family Fixer.

He led the family through grieving the death of my older brother. He scared away the God-complex white coats who wanted to experiment on my older sister. He gets real nasty when those same idiots screw up my mom’s chemo over and over again…

Because that is what real men do.

(When informed of his duties in this respect and my specific thoughts on it, Mr. Genevieve was like: Yeah, obvs, of course I will, babe).

Daddy Wolf tends to be very down-to-earth and solution-oriented.

But.

Sometimes he’s dramatically wrong.

Thus, the necessity of checking in with the Big Man Upstairs, Gandalf the Greatest, the Man in the Long White Beard…

Ok, this is getting trite. You get the idea.

I also realized: In women, INTJ sometimes manifests as a voracious appetite to learn everything about everything all the time (which is frankly impossible), overwhelming anxiety, overanalyzing, and great, great fear. Thus how the devil gets in our heads. I’m not sure why I wasted so much of my life paying attention to politics up to this point and worrying about it, frankly — it took forever for me to learn to tune it out. The America of the future cannot possibly be the America of the past, and God moves in mysterious ways.

When in doubt, pray it out.