People all the time find themselves being put into neat little boxes with labels that don’t exactly capture the correct and all-encompassing definition meant to describe their individual spirits. You are either an extrovert or an introvert, you’re excitable or stoic, you have a slight problem with the parallel park or else you are far from human. For the love of God, won’t the Myer’s-Briggs fan boys shut up for five years and let me breathe for a minute!

I have been called an extrovert, and I have been called an introvert. I call myself an extroverted introvert just to get people to drop the subject at fancy dinner parties. But none of these pesky little qualifiers have done a thing to quell my underlying problem: the fact that I am depressed, searching for an identity to make my home and coming up so unbelievably short in the long run. Maybe it’s the fact that I read so many books consisting of other people’s shoes I want to fill, or maybe it’s something in my genes that predetermined my lack of direction in this walk that causes me to hate the shoes I’m wearing now.

Whichever is the case, I find that I hate this sleight of hand that goes on inside my head, misdirecting me from the truth with sidesteps into riffs on pop psychology. I am somebody, I am anybody, I am no one particular and I am someone special—I am my father’s son, and he would probably slap me for even copping to this brief existential crisis. He’s of the Mecklenburg County clay, a good Southern Baptist and probably never wrong a day in his life; he would probably die if I told him I couldn’t get a grip on myself at the age of 25. He would probably see it as an affront to God or something.

But truth be told I cannot worry over what my father would say or think on the matter. I can no longer depend on him to make my every decision for him. The chick must leave the nest, learn to take a punch and to punch back if need be. I am thankful for the old man’s guidance—and heck, he’s been good for a fishing story or two as well—but if I am to be the best that he made me to become then I cannot untangle the knot by his hand. My search for self must be done on my own terms, or nothing else.

After all I plan on being a father someday myself. I reserve the right to make my future son feel the paternal ire for all it’s worth, and I need to go ahead and get some good practice in while I can.

I have been called an introvert at times, and other times I have been called an extrovert. I’ve been compared to the INFP on the Myers-Briggs test, and I’ve recently been called an ENFP. The former is referred to as the Idealist, while the latter goes by the label of Campaigner. I am a perfectionist by nature, which falls in line with the INFP congregants, but I am also quite smitten with the idea that ENFP’s are the charmers who crave the social environment of crowds. As both types make great writers, I see no problems fitting in with either group. Seeing as I have always struggled with aligning myself neatly with any new social setting, I don’t see how I can claim either camp as the place to pitch my tent. All I want is to find my identity, and yet these qualifiers don’t quite foot the bill.

Daddy, can you help me with this one please? Actually, no, strike that—I promised I could do this on my own. I better stick to my word. It will be a hard one on which to cut my teeth, but this is the hand I’m dealt and I see no other way. Better make the best of it if I can.

The Idealist in me believes I can. The Campaigner in me has already come up with ways of doing it.

It would be the nicest thing in the world if I could find myself out amongst the stars of human categorization. So many compartments and passageways within the bureaucratic curmudgeons of existence, until I find myself lost even before I exit out the front door. Am I a writer or an actor? Do I call myself a Christian struggling with his faith or do I just say ‘agnostic’ and call it a day? How many self-deprecating jokes can I make before it’s no longer funny, and my friends can begin to question my sanity? Do I exist, or is the argument that I am just one of many brains housed in glass jars and plugged into the matrix and doomed for all eternity? Where do these questions end, and where does my life begin?

None of the conventional labels help, for just as I have illustrated with the Myers-Briggs identifiers they don’t fully and accurately reflect the full range of who and what I am. I am a writer as well as a man with an overly dramatic flair; I am a Christian with such doubts hindering my spiritual walk as to cause me to tumble with every step; I am overly confident and overly self-deprecating all rolled into one man who answers to the full given name of James Lawson Moore. There is so much to me, just as there is so much to any man, woman, and child who makes their home in this world, and to try and contain it all within the confines of a few vague words outlined in some popular psychological profile is not only maddening but wholly irresponsible. My thoughts, my fears, my dreams, my loves and my tears—these have etched away at my soul, leaving behind tattoos as a way of marking their place on me, turning me into a sort of illustrated man, with a rich and rewarding history. I am what I am, but there is no short, sweet, and to the point definition which can accurately describe all that that entails. Perhaps that is a good thing, perhaps it isn’t. But either way, this is me.

I am a country all my own, the sole citizen of my mind. I have been called an extrovert, and I have been called an introvert. I have loved and I have loathed, sometimes both at the same time. There is no neat little box for me, but that’s ok. How can you house an entire country inside one of those blasted things anyway?

My father would have probably knocked me a good one for even questioning these things—he calls me his son and says that’s good enough as anything. He’s mostly joking. If he were to see me at the end of the answers I found, I figure he would offer up some form of apology, try and brush off the dent he left on my head and say, “You did good kid.” That’s the way the best fathers do it anyway.

The Myers-Briggs fan boys like to tote their four-letter acronyms around and haunt me with their pretentions. I tell them to go fly a kite. I have no real hate towards that test, but for me it’s wholly inadequate to suit my needs. There is so much more to me than what they try and label me. And so now as I give my induction speech as the President of a country that’s all my own, I say that I can make my peace with this stopping point on my journey to self-discovery. It isn’t as easy as it looks, but it’s a start all the same. And I have enough time to pick up the path again if I need to.

So relax, dad, and let me take the wheel. I think I’ve got this, and for now that has to be good enough for me to fly hot down the dirt road. The Mecklenburg County red clay is calling my name, and my country’s people await me.

You fan boys can give it a rest now. I’ll take it from here.