Relator, not Realtor...

By far the most amazing thing I've learned from all these tests is that I have the RELATOR talent. What does that mean? Essentially, it means I tend to cultivate deep friendships easily AND I need those friendships to sustain me.

That flies in the face of everything I ever believed about myself as an introvert. About five years ago, I had a blog and I had several comments from readers that their favorite entry was titled "The Tyranny of the Extroverts". It was pretty funny. I'll see if I can dig it up and "re-print" for tomorrow.

Even as an introvert, I knew I had no problem relating to people. Yes, I hate small talk and dinner party conversation, but I don't dislike other people. On the contrary, I knew that had a tendency to have fewer friends, but deeper friendships.

What this RELATOR thing has illuminated for me, though, is that I need those friendships. They're fuel for my fire. Without them, I wither. That is an nugget of self-knowledge that I never thought I'd receive. I honestly thought I didn't need these relationships and I styled my life accordingly.

The office where I most recently worked was stifling socially. It was only engineers and they all got on IM and talked with each other. There they'd all be, sitting in their darkened cubicles, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, six feet away from one another, chittering away at their keyboards like insects. It's an Asimovian dystopia. And in that environment, I was miserable (I now realize). These people weren't my friends and they certainly were talking to me and when they did, it was in 30-character bursts of abbreviations. OMG .

Working from home was only slightly better. None of the active antipathy radiating from the cube farm and I could phone whomever I wanted. But still, nobody around. Well, my family, but what's curious here is that they satisfy a different need for me. I need my family for sure, but I need others, too.

I'm feeling the lack of friends on hand particularly strongly today, for some reason.

My next job will involve an office housing people with social skills and with whom I can form friendships. In fact, that may be even more important than the job itself.