There’s a gap in this story.
In Part 1, I told you about the name – about Blanche Coutu and Lysa Coulombe and the puzzle piece moment in my early thirties when I finally understood where the fraudulency had come from. That realization cracked something open. And I wanted more of that feeling.
But more didn’t come right away.
Life kept moving. The business started. The work accumulated. The identity questions didn’t disappear – they just went quieter, the way questions do when you don’t have the tools to answer them yet.
I kept going.
I kept building.
And I kept carrying this low-level awareness that there was still more to excavate, more to understand, more to find out about who I actually was beneath all the roles I was playing.
It wasn’t until my forties – after I’d moved to Pennsylvania, after a season of deliberately slowing down and turning inward – that I picked up the first real tool.
It was Myers-Briggs. And it changed everything.
The Test
I’d heard of Myers-Briggs before. Most people have, even if they couldn’t tell you what the letters mean. I knew it was a personality assessment. I knew it put you into a type. Beyond that, I didn’t know much, and honestly, I wasn’t sure how much stock I’d put in it.
I took it anyway. Because I was tired of not knowing. Because the name realization had shown me that understanding yourself – really understanding yourself – was worth the discomfort of looking. And because some part of me suspected there was a mirror out there that could show me what I hadn’t been able to see on my own.
When my result came back, it said INFJ.
I had no idea what that meant. So I started reading.
The Mirror
INFJ. Introverted. Intuitive. Feeling. Judging.
The rarest type in the Myers-Briggs framework — roughly two percent of the population. Which means for every hundred people in a room, maybe two of them experience the world the way I do.
I want you to sit with that for a second. Because when I read it for the first time, something in me went completely still.
Two percent.
For most of my life, I had felt like something was slightly off about the way I moved through the world. Not broken – just different. I felt things more deeply than seemed normal.
I noticed things other people walked right past.
I needed time alone to process experiences that others seemed to shake off in minutes.
I cared about meaning, depth, and authenticity in a way that sometimes made casual conversation feel like an exercise in endurance.
I thought that was a problem. I thought I was just too much – too sensitive, too intense, too in my head.
And then I read about INFJs and thought: oh. There are other people like me. I’m not a weirdo. I’m an INFJ.
I devoured everything I could find.
The 16personalities.com website became a regular stop – I still have it bookmarked, still have the app.
I listened to podcasts about INFJs. I read INFJ 101 by Lindsay Rossum and HowExpert Press.
I consumed it all with the hunger of someone who had been waiting a long time to feel understood, and was finally, finally finding the language.
What The Mirror Showed Me
Here’s what landed hardest, reading through the INFJ profiles and descriptions:
- INFJs are deep divers. We don’t do surface. We’re not built for small talk and shallow waters. We go looking for the meaning underneath the meaning, the pattern beneath the pattern, the real thing beneath the presented thing. It’s not a choice – it’s just how we’re wired.
- INFJs are rare precisely because most people don’t operate this way. The world is built for a different kind of processing – faster, more external, less concerned with depth. And so INFJs often spend years feeling slightly out of step, slightly misunderstood, slightly too much for the room.
Reading that didn’t make me sad. It made me relieved.
Because suddenly the loneliness I’d felt throughout my life had a name.
The exhaustion of trying to operate on the surface when everything in me wanted to go deeper – that had a name too.
The way I could walk into a room and immediately start noticing the undercurrents, the unspoken things, the gaps between what people were saying and what they actually meant – that wasn’t a quirk. That was a core feature of who I am.
I wasn’t too much. I was just in the wrong depth of water.
The Lens
Once I had the INFJ framework, I started using it the way you use a new pair of glasses – everything got a little clearer, a little more in focus.
When I found myself exhausted after a day that should have been energizing, I’d ask: What is it about your INFJness that’s being triggered right now?
When I felt the pull toward a particular kind of work – deep, meaningful, relational – I understood why.
When I struggled in environments that rewarded speed and surface-level output over depth and nuance, I stopped blaming myself for not fitting in.
The type didn’t define me. But it gave me a starting point for understanding myself that I hadn’t had before.
And more than anything, it confirmed what the name realization had begun to show me: that there was a real, coherent person underneath all the borrowed pieces. Someone with a specific way of seeing, a specific way of processing, a specific way of being in the world.
Finding her was the whole point.
What I Want You to Know
If you’ve taken Myers-Briggs and felt that mirror moment – that oh, that’s me recognition – you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t taken it yet, I’d encourage you to. Not because it tells you everything, or because a four-letter type can capture the full complexity of a human being. It can’t.
But it can give you language. And language is where understanding begins.
I’m still using the app. I still send people to 16personalities.com when they’re starting their own excavation work. Because sometimes the most powerful thing a tool can do is show you that the way you experience the world isn’t a malfunction.
It’s just you. Finally, clearly, unmistakably you.
