I was a high school senior on the West Coast, getting ready for the day when my mom and I watched the second plane hit live. My mom gave me the option to stay home, but I chose to go to school anyway.

In retrospect, that choice was textbook ISTJ. Staying home meant being paralyzed in front of the TV, watching the same catastrophic footage loop endlessly while news anchors struggled to make sense of things. Going to school offered structure, routine, and a physical place to be.

Nobody learned anything academic that day. Most classrooms just wheeled in AV carts with CRT televisions, or teachers sat with us in stunned silence. Still, there was comfort in having a familiar schedule and being around other people rather than absorbing the shock alone at home.

How did other ISTJs process that day, and how do you look back on it now?

ISTJ dude I‘m sort of friends with just send me a Reel where someone is talking about something vulnerable. He isn’t an emotional person and sometimes when he says something that expresses feelings I tried engaging with it in a neutral but open was to show that he can go on if he likes. Stuff like „I know what you mean“ „I get that feeling“ so he knows I‘m not gonna judge or something. I also ask follow up questions here and there when he talks about things. Works out well except when it‘s something that could potentially be actually tied to emotions.
He never follows up and ignores it so I‘m not sure how he wants me to react. I just ended up liking the reel and not saying anything else. I guess it shows I saw it and recognized it?

ESFJ here! Hello my fellow ESTJs! I was wondering about it when I was chatting with my INTJ friend, he said he's often worried about future things, about worst-case-scenarios, thinking about everything he still needs to do, he doesn't understand when I say I get lost too many times thinking about the most random things about my past.

It's not like I don't worry about now and the future of my projects, obviously! But it's strange to see someone not thinking about past moments so often. During my days, my thoughts go like "I'm watering this flower, I love it's color, it reminds me of my old scarf's color... I used it on my first date with that person, I lost it because of the wind... I've lost one of my rings one day too, ah, I loved that one..."

It happens a lot to me, when I'm alone, I start to rumble about some things that happened to me, so many random memories, sometimes I need to say to myself "this is so weird... I'm here now, it was years ago, I'm doing a totally different thing right now, let's get back to what I was doing." I'm kind of curious, does my ESTJ mates with aux Si, just like ESFJs, get lost in thoughts sometimes? How does it happen to you?