I often find myself extremely adept at reading other people; their minds, emotions and intentions. I find reading other people a perfect observational reading skill that I continue to develop and even entertain. Seeing people’s reactions to other people, reading their tell-tale emotions in their faces, their eyes or their responses, even the lack thereof, gives me endless material for analysis.
And I love it.
As long as it does not involve me.
I ascribe this ability to my highly analytical mode as an INTP. It is a basic function to analyze my surroundings from the sideline; to observe and take everything in; sometimes to ponder, sometimes operating on light-speed, drawing my own conclusive points. This way is how I operate and navigate my own way through my daily life.
However, as perhaps typical for an INTP, I fall short of reading other people when their subject is me.
There may be varying reasons for this: Sometimes, my insecurity simply gets the better of me and I start to doubt everything around me, until I manage to calm and center myself again. Sometimes, I have thought I might even border on the autistic spectrum, simply because I cannot analyze my way through a conundrum of even the most basic social interaction involving myself.
The older I get, the more I am inclined to the observation that people are complex beings and therefore their intentions and actions are not easily analyzed through logical or even comprehensible glasses.
But it is certainly ironic that I so easily read other people (or, at least, most people) – as long as I am the observer and not the subject of any interaction with said people.
I almost always second-guess every direction, intent or word turned to me, mostly when I put my foot in something, when I misunderstand or do not express my own intent clearly enough (which frustrates me to no end because I rarely manage to explain myself and only aggravate my own situation).
I can pretend and put on instant-confidence; telling myself I got control of the situation and when the wording actually hit home and I can see that the message and meaning is received as intended, I silently rejoice to myself.
It is somewhat a paradox that I, as an INTP, am desperately dependent on my wording getting across clearly in order not to be misunderstood (a default instinct to a default treatment, I believe) and simultaneously fall into the (in)famous INTP category of a complex, abstractive thinking, distracted nature and a wording that constantly gets off-track.
Confessions of a female INTP 