A is for Asshole

So out of curiosity yesterday I found a site that offers the Big Five Personality Test for free.  Also called the OCEAN or CANOE test, the Big Five measures five attributes that seem to be universally applicable to humans: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.  For each component, you fall somewhere on a spectrum between the poles of the attribute and its opposite.

In the past I self-diagnosed where I fall for each of the Big Five but had never actually taken the test, so yesterday I figured, what the hell.  Mostly my results didn't surprise me; I fall in the middle on the Extraversion scale (drives my therapists nuts when they can't determine whether I'm an introvert or extravert), and my Conscientiousness appears to have increased to being neither conscientious nor disorganized (depending, I guess, on whether or not I give a shit).  The big surprise came from my Agreeableness score: Among the other respondents, I landed in the 38th percentile, far, far closer to the harsh, abrasive, callous end of the spectrum than the nice, accommodating, cooperative end that I expected.

The test's impressively tactful diagnosis: "You find it easy to express irritation with others."

A quick life-montage of my interactions with others would show an overwhelming skew to the accommodating. From childhood on, I did what others asked, bent to others' needs, mostly in terror of disapproval or the resigned conviction that I had no choice.  Apparently agreeableness isn't quite in my nature, though -- I resent impositions like hell; I detest when people behave contrary to my wishes; I do not like to share; thoughtlessness and stupidity annoy the shit out of me.  I am, in short, a grumpy bitch.

I just don't often act like one.

Jeff used to describe me as compliant.  It's a key concept: I didn't accommodate others because I liked to; I complied for other reasons, largely having to do with a lack of boundaries.  I had to learn assertiveness and self-advocacy.  As a result of my early schooling in compliance and my late training in noncompliance, I'm better equipped to express my disagreeableness in healthy ways, while refraining from ripping people to shreds (unless they really, really have it coming).

So I guess it's to my credit that most people don't have any idea how easily irritated I get; I reign that shit in hard because social acceptance is, you know, important.

But my tending toward the disagreeable possibly explains why it feels so, so good to let loose on someone who is begging for a setdown.  And perhaps why, however politely I frame requests when I'm annoyed, the person I'm talking to usually gets the point.

Here's to being cranky.