Details, Details, Not My Cup Of Tea

Lately I've been working my way through Carol Tuttle's Dressing Your Truth, which sorts people into four personality types, each carrying its own kind of energy. Reading it, I've decided I'm the scattered sort. Being an accountant has never once appealed to me. Columns of numbers that have to be tracked and lined up feel like punishment. At a garage sale I can't be trusted with the cash box. Tax season rattles me, and I dread its arrival. Back when I was juggling a business and a farm at the same time, the whole thing left me spinning. Setting up a budget and actually sticking to it can turn into a small disaster.

Going by the system, I figure I'm mostly a type 3 with a bit of type 1 underneath. Neither of those is the tidy, methodical kind. I'll add the same column of figures twice and get two different totals, and I still cling to the arithmetic I grew up with. Use it or lose it, as they say. Modern math and Common Core can keep their distance. My kids are grown now, so that part of it skipped me, though they're stuck dealing with it themselves. Oddly enough, geometry in high school came easy to me. Go figure.

There's a particular sting when your grown children assume you can manage the things they manage without trouble. My daughters strike me as more type 2, the ones who care about details, and type 4, the orderly and structured ones. Knowing the energy types has softened how I see myself. We type 3's run hot and a little rebellious, and we rarely fade into the wallpaper. The names people pinned on me, Wildcat and Wildfire, say as much. Where my dad dug up Pumpkin for me as a girl I'll never know, since I was neither round nor orange.

The plain fact is that no two of us are built the same. Even identical twins carry small differences. Two girls in my grade school proved it: one was the quieter one and not quite the student the other was, and still you couldn't tell them apart by looking. So what I'm getting at is a plea for patience. Cut me some slack when I'm not wired the way you are and I struggle to do a thing your way. And one more note: men run into the same wall, and they come in different energy types too.

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