#I also don't know how much of my fretting is overthinking and overreacting

[hells-greatestdad]

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Tomorrow morning I will wake up for a morning shift at work, then I'm going to have a 4 day staycation from Tuesday til Friday

Goodness knows I need a break from that place lately....

[ardenttheories]

If you don't mind me asking, what makes you a Page of Heart? What made you come to that conclusion? I'm always curious about someone's reasonings for such matters and would like to hear yours! But only if you're okay with sharing, I know it's a very personal question!

I’m more than happy to answer this!

So, I should probably begin by saying that, personally, figuring out my Classpect was... hard. I have a tendency to put up fronts for various people in different situations, which made pinning down my actual personality difficult. I was at a point, a few years back, where I couldn’t say what my aesthetic was, what my style was, what my sona looked like, what my favourite colour was - because I genuinely couldn’t settle down on any one thing that I liked. I had no idea if blue represented me best, or orange, or if I liked the way a singular sona represented me. 

It was a point in my life where I genuinely didn’t understand Heart enough to figure out who I was. I overcompensated by trying to position myself as specific things for people - a father-figure for my best friend, a stoic and capable partner for my boyfriend - and I actually relied really heavily on fictional characters to base my sense of identity around. 

So, this made actually determining my Classpect part of my journey to figuring out the real one, in a weirdly paradoxical way. I spent so long trying to Classpect myself based on these facets of my personality that I never noticed the facets existed to begin with - yet, when I actually looked closer at them, the Page of Heart just... clicked.

Furthermore, I tended not to consider myself, and had a habit of letting myself suffer or let my own issues boil up in my desperation to be good for other people. I self-sacrificed for no good reason, and it tended to mean two big things happened:

- People came to me with every little issue they had, parked their anxieties with me, and left me fretting over them for the rest of the day because I didn’t realise they just needed to vent, and weren’t in actual danger (the part of a Page of Heart that just misunderstands situations and events, and has an incorrect Emotional response)

- I exploded on people over incredibly minor things further down the line, almost consistently when I was at my least emotionally stable, to the point that my boyfriend began to fear my montly (which always fucks me up) and my best friend begged me to see a therapist (the part of a Page of Heart that tends to overreact)

Though, to be fair, I’ve always struggled figuring out emotional consistency (which hits home on how Pages of Heart give disproportionate emotional responses). I tend to flit back and forth between extremes, which has led to... a lot of negative situations; me chasing after boys, screeching, for something as minor as calling me a “maneater”, or me having a severe mood drop after being cut off over something I was talking about, even if it wasn’t intentional. 

This is what made me realise, after some thought, that I probably wasn’t a Mind Player. Heart is all about Impulsivity and Emotion, and I was definitely showing that over the concept of Logic and Distance. I was too Passionate, too Illogical, even though at first I thought I was just someone who maybe struggled with their Mind and ghosted Heart. 

The problem was, Logic has never been my issue. I can be very Logical. I can think things through to a fault, I can even overthink, I can analyse and pick apart and tell you exactly what was going through my Mind at that exact point; it’s just that my Emotions were what overruled. It’s the Heart that I focused on most, and the part that I struggled to contain. 

Pages of Heart start with a Lack of Heart - start with almost no understanding or power over Heart - and then get better and better at it as they go through life. 

This is what pegged me into the idea of something like a Page, rather than a Bard and Prince. Because I was good at Heart-stuff, just not all the time. 

I’m really good at figuring out peoples’ Emotions. I can read a situation pretty well (though it’s taken time for me to figure that out, and at first I almost always got it wrong), and I can pretty easily Classpect people with a fair amount of accuracy (which has come from me analysing people down to the ground and building up my own understanding of Heart over several years). 

I accurately guessed what a new friend’s favourite animal, colour, and style was, despite not having spoken to them for long and having had no prior information about them. This, compared to several years ago, when I couldn’t tell my boyfriend what his favourite colour was even though he actively reblogged yellow things all the time. 

I had a tendency to try and shove my nose into every problem a friend had because I wanted to be helpful. I thought I knew how to fix everything, knew how I could be the one to save the day, and I loved it whenever I was even vaguely right - though most of the time I was almost painfully wrong. I got into arguments with friends who just wanted to vent because I tried too hard to be empathetic and to help, or I related back to myself too much as an example. 

I’m much better at that now. I can usually diffuse a situation without much issue, can pick up on when something’s wrong with most people, and have a much easier time connecting Emotionally now than I used to. I find that my advice tends to hit home to people more now that I can understand them and their needs better - and people tend to open up to me more now, too! But I’ve also gotten better at setting up my own boundries, and that... that helps a lot. 

I think it’s also safe to say that I was a bit... super-obsessed with my likes and my passions. 

I know, for sure, that I’ve pretended to be obsessed with something just to try and validate my own feelings. To connect that flimsy sense of identity, I’ve claimed that I love puppetry when I know nothing about it, or that I adore horses when at the time I was probably more connected to cats or rabbits. 

I also know that I have been obsessed with things to the point that throughout my life, I’ve always had that one main fandom hyperfixation, and pretty much nothing else besides. I still like other things, of course - I just can’t get into them as much as that one hyperfixation I have. That, though, never stopped me from pretending I knew a bunch about Transformers for a friend. 

All of what I’ve said above hits pretty much every point on Dahni’s Page of Heart analysis and Sylph of Hope’s Page of Heart analysis. I used these two sources to help me figure out my Classpect (with the assistance of my boyfriend, so that I wasn’t falling into the Page trappings of only picking up parts of my Identity), and especially reading Dahni’s post, it all just seemed to click.

My journey was to learn to be “balanced and sincere with their emotions, their affections, and with themselves”, to be “passionate, sincere and truly honest”. I have been fluctuating through such extremes throughout my life, with very little honesty towards myself or my identity - finally reading that, accepting that I have to settle down, to learn, and to take care of myself before I can truly help others? It’s made understanding who I am so much easier. It’s made being better for my friends, for this blog, for my family, so much easier. 

Essentially, it felt like the challenge fit. And it’s a challenge I’m still facing, for sure - one that’s in no way been easy, and one I’ve definitely fucked up on a few times along the way - but I know that I’m becoming a better person now than I used to be by facing it.

I know my Classpect, now. I know the name I want to go by. I know the way I want to be seen. I know my favourite colour, my favourite animal, and I can say with some degree of certainty that I know what my aesthetic is. This improvement has meant so much to me. I have a stable sense of me in a way I didn’t have even just a few years ago. 

That’s how I know I’m a Page of Heart, I think. I vibed with it, it explained parts of me I didn’t think anything really could, and the challenge has made me a better person.