a/n: this is what I’d call a “proof-of-life” post, so it’ll be short/sweet. It’s been too long since I’ve updated my blog, for reasons (IWoreTheNamesIWTNiwtnIWTNiwtnIwTnIWTNiwtwint)

In 2022, my personality test said I was a Mediator: INFP-T.

Introverted, intuitive, feeling, prospecting, and turbulent, which sounds about right for the version of me who was still mostly living inside all my feels, before I’d figured out how to build anything sturdy around it.

I decided to take the same test again at the tail end of June 2026, after publishing my memoir.

This time, I got Advocate: INFJ-T.

At first, that was disappointing. Like all this thinking and growing had no real, quantifiable result. Almost nothing had changed. Just one letter, and even that barely moved.

So I’m still introverted. Still intuitive. Still feeling. Still turbulent. The only real shift is from Prospecting to Judging, and it’s barely over the line.

Maybe I didn’t change entire personalities. Maybe I’d just shifted my primary coping strategy again.

Every stage of my life has required a different one. Eventually, I realized those strategies were not just survival patterns. They traced the way my mind adapted. Each one protected me for a while, until it started asking too much of me. Then another took its place. That pattern became the memoir’s three-part structure.

Lifelong learning means recognizing when an old strategy has stopped protecting me, then letting a truer bluer story replace the one I built when I had fewer tools.

The 2022 version of me needed freedom, possibility, emotional truth, and room to wander. She needed to follow the feeling wherever it went because feeling was the only map she trusted.

Anyone familiar with my memoir might recall this line from part i, Maiden of Begging:

“I don’t recall the past the way most people expect. I re-feel events…“

But the version of me who wrote that line needed something else too. Something more than just her feelings. Structure. Boundaries. Evidence. A system strong enough to hold the emotion without letting it take over completely.

That’s the real mini-revelation: I’m not less sensitive now. I’m just more structured around my sensitivity. It’s a structure I inherited from watching my mom; it’s something I didn’t even know I possessed until I became an adult and started writing this memoir.

Putting it into practice is easier said than done, but it can be done. Or the memoir wouldn’t be finished right now.

Writing the memoir forced me to become the kind of woman who can source her own pain. Not because the pain itself is questionable, but because I know how easily emotion can blur into guilt, and guilt can disguise itself as truth.

So I built rules. An incredibly detailed, personalized system to help me understand myself. I built it over time in a way that made sure the story didn’t become another place where feeling gets mistaken for fact.

In 2022, I was still trying to understand myself by following the flood. Now, I’m trying to understand myself by building the banks.

Before: I felt everything and needed room to make meaning from it.

The Shift: I realized feeling alone couldn’t carry the work. If I wanted the memoir to be honest, I needed structure strong enough to protect the truth from panic, over-explaining, self-blame, and beautiful distortions.

After: I can see the personality shift less as a new identity and more as evidence of adaptation. It’s almost like a fourth stage after Crone of Cleaving, or perhaps its continuation.

(Gods, I hope this doesn’t sound like psychobabble and y’all understand what I’m trying, very badly, to explain.)

Basically, I’m still the same inward-facing, meaning-hungry, emotionally porous person. But now I know that structure is not the enemy of feeling.

Structure is how I keep feeling from becoming another form of self-erasure.

Daily writing prompt

Are you a lifelong learner?

View all responses

inspo: finding my 2022 personality test results in an old email // taking the same test after finishing the memoir // one letter barely moving and wanting to know what that meant // coping strategies as life stages // using Maiden, Mother, Crone as structure instead of costume // learning when an old strategy stops protecting me // letting a truer bluer story replace the one I built with fewer tools // mostly, realizing growth doesn’t always look like becoming someone entirely brand-spanking new

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

See Full Bio