Analyze This!

I found this over on Jennie Crusie's blog. Some company has come up with a way to insta-analyze your blog and give it a Myers-Briggs rating. (If you don't know about Myers-Briggs, it's a personality evaluation survey used by psychiatrists to help with treatment and by writers to help with character development.)

Here's the rating for this blog:

ESFP - The Performers

The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don´t like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves. They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions.


When I first saw my result, I waved it off because it's almost a perfect opposite of my actual personality -- only three of the four letters match my own Myers-Briggs inventory.

But then I read a bit more on the website about the way the blog analyzer works, and one of the things mentioned was that different blogs written by the same people can yield different results. It's not the writer's personality being inventoried, but the blog's.

And then I realized something else. Knitting is where I escape. Hard for me to be a manager? Shoot, I'm a manager at two different companies. My default position is telling everyone else what to do, delegating, making everything around me run smoothly.

But knitting is where I escape all of that. Or try to, anyway.

Live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead? People make fun of me for being so hyper-organized. I have a plan for how to plan my plans. But in my knitting life, I do my best to keep that urge at bay. Yeah, okay, so I gave into my natural urges and invented the monster database of patterns cross-indexed a dozen different ways. But I don't know when I'll pick up my needles again, and when I do, I don't know which project I'll choose. I knit by the seat of my pants.

I could go on, but I guess the point is that this blog analyzer showed me a few truths about why knitting is so important to me. It's not just a pressure valve, not just a place to blow off steam, but a place where I act so different from my usual driven self that the steam never has a chance to accumulate.