Being an intuitive type isn’t always a rosy chalice of cherry wine cooler. Comprising roughly 25% of the population, intuitives are a minority in a world dominated by sensors. And yet, intuitives account for the majority of the world’s most brilliant and influential trailblazers and visionaries. Einstein (INTP), Newton (INTJ), Zuckerberg (INTJ), Martin Luther King Jr. (ENFJ), Steve Jobs (ENTJ), the list goes on. Intuitives live in the future-world of envisioned possibilities but this can present problems for them in the here-and-now. Here are 99 struggles that come along with being an intuitive.
- When you think of about five or more different concepts of time whilst walking to the kitchen but fail to notice that you forgot to open the door before trying to walk through it…
- You think Sensors seem to be “missing” something, and the Sensors think you aren’t all there.
- The real world bores you.
- When you try to explain something and you end up going into a dozen different tangents triggered by what you’re saying. You can be terrible at telling stories.
- When you’re always going on about how you just figured something out, but you’re often unable to explain what it is or provide any examples.
- When you spend several moments walking around looking for something you’ve been carrying in your hand.
- When you’ve seen something every day, and only processed it days/months/years later.
- When you throw something out in a conversation thinking it’s clearly a part of the conversation but no one understands where it’s coming from or how it’s relevant.
- When your train of thought forks and you try to follow both paths at once, but end up thinking about the pesky limitations of your human brain instead.
- You can spend hours talking theory about something you’ll never do.
- You tend to think people much older than you are more interesting than “kids your own age”, even once you’re well into adulthood.
- You wonder what it would be like to be a tire, and all the shit you’d have to go through.
- You want the glue that binds facts together… facts aren’t enough.. lists aren’t enough. You crave understanding.
- The random thoughts that run through your mind can crack you up and make it appear like you’ve gone mental to everyone around you.
- When you see something coming a mile away or a brilliant answer pops into your head and people are astounded by your ingenuity, but when they ask how you came to that conclusion, you can’t tell them because you don’t really know yourself.
- You lose track of time in the bathtub/shower because you’re daydreaming.
- When you have arguments with yourself and never really consider the possibility that you might be insane.
- When you have the urge to use a metaphor or simile to explain everything.
- When you always want to make shortcuts in your activities because repetition bores you.
- When you absolutely have to have a journal, pencil, and voice recorder in your purse at all times to capture random thoughts that you want to remember later.
- When you stop in the middle of what you’re doing to go google the correlation between something.
- When you sympathize with a 5 year old for being told to shut up from their parent after asking so many questions, because you’re just as inquisitive and can definitely relate.
- You constantly feel like you’re weird, and slowly going crazy.
- When you forget you’re walking down stairs and end up skipping the last two or three and continue like nothing happened.
- When you have long and elaborate conversations with people that are completely imaginary.
- When you keep seeing exploding dolphins…. GET OUT OF MY HEAD.
- When you’re off in your own world and then you jump or flinch because some starts talking to you.
- When your conversations can go from how stupid everyone is and censorship to why don’t men’s bathrooms have dick washing stations.
- When your thoughts are coming so quickly (and erratically) that you have a tendency to skip words when typing.
- When asking someone a question, you figure out the answer in your head before your mouth gets there, then try to explain that you’ve already got it – so all that comes out of your mouth is a complete load of half-word gibberish.
- Your teacher tells you that no one else ever asked that question before.
- When you open a browser and forget what you were looking for, and you have about 20 tabs open already.
- When you can have three hour conversations with a friend fantasizing about all the possibilities of being stranded on a desert island.
- When you wake up from a dream, realize that’s not how it was supposed to end, then fall back asleep and re-dream it with a new and improved ending.
- When you have random phrases that pop in your head, but you have no clue what they mean. However, this does not stop you from recording them in a journal since you feel like it was some sort of poetic epiphany.
- When you’ve considered paying someone to follow you around all day and tell you where you left your keys, remind you to shower and eat, and wake you up so you won’t be late for work every single morning, but then you realized you’d much rather just think about it than actually have to go through the process of finding someone to do it.
- When the thought of having sex arouses you more than actually performing.
- Your clarifications confuse the people around you even more.
- You wake up from your sleep and have figured solution to a bugging problem.
- When people seem to have trouble following you train of thought.
- When you had plans of things you wanted to get done, but then you get competely sidetracked by an idea or something interesting online.
- When you’re studying and go to get a snack, and you accidentally leave your book in the fridge. But you can’t remember what you were studying so you don’t realize and just read another book. Which you then also leave in the fridge. True story. – lirulin (INTJ)
- When you constantly miss things that are right in front of your nose.
- When you can’t comprehend that a good portion of the population is unable to conjure up an image at will. Whereas YOU can conjure up 3D action-packed movies of the plot of your choosing in your mind, with all the special effects and intentional visual/audio changes you wish.
- You can come up with grand unifying mathematical theories but have trouble remembering your multiplication tables.
- You tell people that you walk for exercise, but you really do it so your mind can wander.
- When the phrase “show your work” makes you cringe.
- When you end up averaging one meal per-day because you don’t notice you’re hungry until the day’s almost over.
- When you accidentally shampoo your hair with your body wash and then almost wash your face with your conditioner. And, added bonus, you’ve been awake for hours so you can’t blame sleepiness for the mistakes.
- You are like an eccentric millionaire minus the millionaire.
- When you take a little trip to the kitchen and 5 minutes after you’ve finished and are walking towards the living room you realize you put your phone in the fridge and are now carrying an eggplant. You don’t even try to figure out how that happened.
- When surrounded by boring, reality-bound conversation, you begin to throw in comments that are more absurd than you’d usually say just to see people’s reactions.
- You’re bad at giving directions because you really can’t recall precisely how you do each step.
- When, because you know yourself so well by now, you constantly remind yourself that you must’ve forgotten something. You think about it for a couple of minutes and make sure you have everything….and it seems that you actually haven’t forgotten anything, for once. Until the end of the day, as you’re lying in bed right before you go to sleep….you remember…you actually DID forget something.
- You space out even while watching things you enjoy.
- When your sense of place and direction are terrible because usually you never pay attention to where the people you’re with are driving or walking to. You just space out to think and suddenly you’re there in no time.
- When you redirect the conversation from gossip, to the universe but those conversations are so rare that you don’t really know how to handle it with strangers, so you make a joke and change the subject again. Besides, you can already predict all their possible responses.
- When upon getting an email, you compose a brilliant answer in your head, and maybe even type half of it out, and start wondering how your friend will respond to it. And then, a week later without a response to your genius, you realize you never actually sent it.
- When walking down the street or among a large crowd, your mind always gets blown by the idea that every single one of these people are thinking of something right now… it’s a bunch of little worlds walking around.
- When people seem to be transparent to you, but somehow others don’t notice what you clearly perceive in others.
- When you feel like you can “see through” people because your hunches about people’s motives almost always turn out to be right.
- When you are constantly fine-tuning your definitions of words to express your inner ideas more fluently.
- When you try to hide your lack of common sense from your Sensor friends.
- When you remember something someone said earlier, not because you actually remember them saying it but because you can trace back the train of thought it set off.
- You know you’re an intuitive when other people’s definition of bizarre is your definition of awesome.
- When you wish you could just let people into your brain so they could see what’s going on instead of having to try and explain it.
- When you experience a disconnect looking into the mirror because it’s hard to make the connection between what is you and the body that houses it.
- When you’re so busy thinking about a bad pothole you’ll need to avoid on your drive home that you forget about the speed trap you’re flying through on your way to work.
- You would like to warn someone about something but you’re afraid they’ll think your a nutcase.
- When you run into a man on the street that is wearing no pants and you still try to pay attention to what he is saying.
- When you catch your brain “turning-off” during conversation with some people because it is not stimulating enough.
- You know you’re intuitive when you stop on the street to have a long philosophical conversation with a homeless person, asking how they ended up there and why they choose this way of life.
- You go shopping with a list in hand—and spend a long time in the store browsing—and leave the store having forgotten to look at the list in your hand.
- When you leave a task half done because something else more interesting caught your attention…
- You thoughtlessly put the the spoon in the trash bin and the yogurt in the sink.
- When you never get bored on long journeys, because the world inside your head is so interesting it doesn’t matter if your surroundings aren’t.
- When you almost get into car wrecks on a daily basis cause you were day dreaming, even though you thought about the possibility of getting into said accidents before you even set out.
- When you see the evil in a priest and the good in a criminal…..
- People who repeat “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” like a mantra, get on your nerves.
- You can figure out the plot & the who done it 1/2 way into the 2nd segment of a 1 hour scripted television show.
- When you leave your house and head off to work, but drive alllllllll the way back because you think you left the door open.
- When you almost get run over because you were too in your own head to notice you were crossing a road.
- You know you’re an intuitive when, as a three-year-old, your defense to scribbling on the walls was that you had an alternate personality that made you do it.
- When you take chemistry then you start going insane because you cant comprehend how thoughtless atoms can create intelligent beings with unique thoughts.
- When you can’t be realistic to save your life.
- When the most revealing and insightful parts of a deep conversation with someone is in all the things the other person doesn’t verbalize.
- When you don’t need quiet to think. Having (unobtrusive) background distractions actually helps because it gives other senses something to preoccupy themselves with while ideas are stewing.
- You know you’re an intuitive when you know that but have fun trying to make connections anyway even if they turn out to be irrelevant.
- When you enjoy learning new subject matter almost solely for the analogies it could inspire.
- You know you’re an intuitive when in doing essay questions for class, the ones that require you to just regurgitate information are painstaking to you, while the ones that are more theoretical make you more enthusiastic.
- You put off purchasing something so that you can think about having the item rather than actually having it.
- When you know you will come up with a solution. You just need to sleep on it; It will come to you.
- You have been misunderstood by 75% of people on regular bases.
- When you remember you have to go somewhere, but when you reach your intended destination you completely forget why you’re there. Then you realize that you were supposed to go there tomorrow.
- You find things that others consider hard very easy, but you struggle with things that other deem easy.
- Deja vu is frequent for you.
- You’ve predicted bad outcomes of people/situations.
- You can remember ideas better than facts.
- When you watch a movie, but don’t remember any of the characters’ names at the end.
source: personalitycafe.com
- When you think of about five or more different concepts of time whilst walking to the kitchen but fail to notice that you forgot to open the door before trying to walk through it…
