Eleven

INTJ(ej)*

The Supercharged Dragon

A Supercharged Approach to Expectable Trends

“Mike, I’m sorry… The gate, I opened it. I’m the monster.”

INTJ(ej) examples: Natalie Portman, Henry Ford, Queen Elsa* – Frozen

Eleven is everything that makes paradoxes wonderful. She’s intelligent and wise, but has the vocabulary and experience of a toddler when interacting with most civilization. She has the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she still gets excited about Eggos, romantic TV, and Trick or Treating. She’s a death ray who worries she’s not pretty enough.

She speaks to the contrasting sides in all of us. Even if we don’t have supernatural powers, we each have areas where we feel strong and ready to kick butt, and areas where we feel small and vulnerable and need others to help us make it through. Basically, we all have areas where we can save others, and we all have areas where we need them to save us.

I’ve seen criticism around the internet about S2E7, “Lost Sister,” where Eleven takes her rebellious coming-of-age adventure to Chicago, right in the middle of the action back home. Complaints about the episode disrupting the pacing, or separating Eleven so she couldn’t bounce off the rest of the characters, have seemed to be frequent. I’ve even seen several speculate that Kali’s gang was brought to the forefront for pure spin-off potential. I think all of these opinions miss the mark on not only Eleven’s walkabout episode, but on her entire character arc.

By the end of S1, we saw how epic both Eleven and her abilities were. Her ability to take down the Demogorgon when literally no one else could, not even swarms of armed men with guns, or lighting it on fire, demonstrated her as-yet unparalleled strength. Even before that, we saw Eleven levitate Mike in order to save his life and even flip a frickin van over their heads.

By the time S2 begins, we’re not on the edge of our seats wondering if El can handle herself, physically. Therefore, that’s not the challenge that El needs to face, going into S2. In fact there are so many reasons that Eleven’s journey in S2 can’t just be coming back with nosebleed-vengeance after five minutes in the Upside Down and juggling demodogs with her mind. Besides not being a challenge that would grow her in any significant way, it would undermine her heartfelt sacrifice in S1. It would undermine Mike’s pain at her loss (although he would want to punch me in the stomach for saying his missing her was necessary). And it would take away everyone else’s opportunities to have to handle things without her.

But those are just extra reasons that Eleven’s character arc requires isolation in S2. The main reason that Eleven couldn’t be out kicking evil puppies is the classic Spider-trope: With great power comes great responsibility. Responsibility that, as good as Eleven is, she had not learned yet as a teenager, especially raised as she was. Eleven’s story is really a superhero story. And in the absence of Kryptonite (which can really undermine your hero) or an Achilles’ heel, how do you make a superhero story challenging? How do you hamper someone with supernatural powers without literally hampering their supernatural powers?

That’s right, you give them internal struggles instead. I mean, honestly without internal struggles, external ones are pretty pointless for any protagonist, but especially for supernaturally strong ones.

Eleven’s entire journey so far has been trying to figure out what “home” is and how her home defines her as a person. Over and over again, people tell Eleven to find home with them, but she has to figure out for herself what home even means, and let herself see that she’s the kind of person that deserves one.

Let’s trace this internal evolution in Eleven, learning to define home, starting with the first time we see her.



When Eleven steals from Benny, she’s not looking for home, as such; she’s just trying to survive her first time outside the lab. She doesn’t even seem to know what a “name” is. She’s just the number on her wrist, just 011.

But Benny Hammond, in his ISTP(ep)* utter realness, gently breaks down her barriers a little, and gives her a proto-home with things like smiles, loving consequences in the form of food and ice-cream for working with him and answering his questions, and even a comfy t-shirt instead of her lab clothes of hospital gowns and deprivation tank harnesses. It’s the warmest she’s ever been treated, and makes a lasting impression on her, even though that very first true “home” experience only lasts a matter of hours.

So when Mike asks for her name, because of her interaction with Benny, Eleven not only now knows that the-title-that-defines-her is what Mike is asking for, but she wants to tell him, to trust him, immediately showing him her wrist tattoo. She wants to feel that safe feeling again, like she did in that fleeting time with Benny.

And right from the beginning, Mike makes her feel safe and wanted, like so much more than a weapon or a number. I don’t think she would have been so quick to show Dustin her tattoo, and certainly not Lucas, who questions her every motive.

Right away, Mike sees her as both a person and a girl, two things she’s never been allowed to be. She’s never even been allowed the right of physical privacy, as demonstrated by her willingness to strip, which makes the boys panic. And the way Eleven’s face lights up with hope and surprise when Mike nicknames her “El,” it’s like the first time she’s been allowed to have her own identity her entire life.

But El also feels dangerous, especially after what happened to Benny.

We’re going to be talking about Type Angsts a lot in this post, and basically what a Type Angst is, is the core fear that comes part and parcel with a cognitive type’s strengths and weaknesses, and different ways that individuals cope with their cognition’s core fear. They stem from the later half of our cognition process, where we feel the weakest and most vulnerable, since it’s the lowest priority for our minds. We naturally fear that the areas where we struggle will keep us from succeeding in our most beloved pursuits.

IJs struggle most with Observation and Motives, and Observation starts with oneself, and so IJ Type Angsts all center on feeling like their selfness isn’t truly known or wanted. And Universal NTs (INTJ and ENTP) fear they aren’t conventional enough (ST – established use). So this combination means that INTJs fear that their Motives and what defines them as a person, are just too intense, too turbulent.

And INTJ’s Type Specialization is knowing how to use Principles to get exactly the desired useful result they want, on a huge scale. INTJs know exactly how to get the World to wiggle the way they want, able to predict through useful concept (NT) how choices will set up large-scale trajectories or Trends, which (like all Type Specializations) is really awesome.

But that means that INTJs feel their ability to control very ardently. All IJs tend to feel like if they don’t do something, it won’t get done, but INTJs tend to feel this most of all. Once a person feels like they can change the trajectory of how things will unfold, it’s a natural progression to feel responsible for how things will unfold, to feel like if they don’t go 100% to plan, then it’s 100% your fault.

That is INTJ’s Type Angst, lovingly nicknamed “Anakin Angst” for the distress that caused Darth Vader: INTJ’s fear that everything is their fault. (I won’t go through the in-depth formulas for each Type Angst as we go through this post, but hopefully that gives you a taste of what forms a Type Angst, in case this is your first intro to them.) And each INTJ subtype deals with this fear a little differently, as we’ll explore as we continue to talk about the INTJs of Stranger Things.

Eleven knows and is pleased with her own power. Her handling of the annoying fan at Benny’s, stopping it with her mind like she was waving away a pesky fly, her unimpressed reaction to Mike’s description of Yoda’s powers, and her refusal to levitate the Millennium Falcon model just because Dustin tells her to, all show us that she knows what she can do, is proud of it, but also doesn’t feel the need to flaunt it. She feels capable, useful, and independent in her Actions.

But when things go wrong, like when Benny is shot, we see Eleven’s panic. When she tells Mike about the “bad men,” we see the far-off scared in her eyes. She feels a looming danger following her, watching for her to slip up, like the very person she is isn’t ST practical. Even with all her power, she fears its limits. What if she can’t control things sufficiently to protect the people she loves, the growing family and home that she’ll give anything to keep safe? Can all her abilities actually be of practical benefit to the people she loves?

She’s proud of her power, but is it ST Practical enough to actually keep people safe, here and now? Is it any more useful than a freaky sort of parlor trick? Or worse, do her powers themselves endanger those she cares about?

When Lucas calls Eleven a weirdo and a freak, it feeds into the fear that she already has, that everything is her fault and that she only brings destruction. It only reaffirms to her that, for all her powers, they aren’t practical (which Lucas specializes in and excels at as an ST); they’re just “weird.”

But maybe, maybe if she can use her powers to keep people safe, to make them happy in their lives, then maybe she can have a practical use after all? Maybe the world will actually be better because of her being in it, not worse. Then maybe she won’t be a monster, maybe then she’ll even have a home.

But she fears that if anything bad happens to anyone she cares about, it must be because she was just too much monster, and too little friend. She fears she’s just a broken weapon, just not right.

A phrase that comes up recurrently with Eleven is “What is wrong with you?!”

Lucas says this sentiment often in S1, which obviously hurts Eleven, but when Mike yells it at her after they find Will’s “body,” that sticks with her much harder. If the only person who has ever truly seen her believes something is broken inside her, then maybe she really is. So that hurts, but she knows she’s not lying, knows Will is still really out there, so she keeps at it with the walkie talkie and shows Mike the truth.

But as soon as the boys find out that there’s a Gate to the Upside Down, you can see El’s panic. She tries to steer them away from the Gate that she knows exists, that she believes is entirely her fault to have opened, that she is the monster that escaped from the lab (which Lucas affirms to her). She wants to protect them from the thing most out of her control: her own selfness. When Eleven says “it isn’t safe” with tears in her eyes, I think what she’s really saying is “I’m not safe, and I should really leave you to protect you, but I don’t want to be alone, so instead I’ve been hoping to just protect you from what I am and what I’ve done.”

So then when Lucas is saying things about Eleven that she’s terrified are true, that she’s a liar and a traitor… and a monster, and Mike and Lucas start fighting, she panics and throws Lucas backward. She’s clearly stunned by what she’s done and Mike says it again, much more intensely this time: “What is wrong with you?!”

Eleven no longer has the comfort of just hoping that if she gives Mike more information, then he’ll no longer blame her. She has more information, and that information makes her feel like a freak who opened the Gate and started it all. So she leaves, and becomes home-less and alone, once again.

I find Eleven’s relationship to Nancy all the more potent and sad, given that Nancy is another of Stranger Things’ INTJs. Every time Nancy comes up in S1, we can see Eleven’s longing. When she calls Nancy “pretty” or explores her room, we can see Eleven mourning the life she might have had, were she allowed to grow up as a normally precocious INTJ girl, instead of a weapon and lab experiment. When Eleven wears Nancy’s old dress, makeup, and wig out into the world, and feels “pretty… good” for the first time, it’s like she’s dressing up in Nancy’s younger, carefree life in a way, able to blend in with other kids and be out and see the world. But then when her wig gets crumpled and her face all dirty, it makes her feel like she was only pretending to be anything besides a weirdo, a weapon, and a monster. That earns a supersonic yell, I think.

Hungry, and still wishing she were like any other girl, Eleven ventures into town for food. She’s so sick of being stared at like a freak, so tired of scientists in the past and now the people of Hawkins looking at her like something behind a “Please Don’t Tap the Glass” sign. So by the time she calls the grocery store manager “mouth-breather,” she’s so done pretending to be normal and mundane, because clearly it wasn’t working anyway. She smashes the doors, and strides out into the sunlight to go be alone with her Eggos in peace. Might as well be singing “Let it Go.”

But as much as she wants to pretend that she and the Eggos can live a happy life frolicking in the forest together, when she hears Mike calling her name, she follows. Maybe he does really care and want her, even if she’s a freak; it’s worth watching and seeing anyway. And so she’s there to save his body, and he’s there to save her heart, to let her know that her intentions make her the hero, not the villain.

That episode is “The Monster” with the double-meaning of learning more about the Demogorgon, and Eleven’s reveal to the boys about why she’s sure she’s the monster. (Maybe a triple meaning, with us finding out more about what made Brenner a monster.)

When they get back to the house, for a very brief respite, Mike tries to convey how much having her back means to him:

Mike: “I’m happy you’re home.”

El: “Me too.”

This is the first time the actual word “home” comes up with El, and this shows how easily she’s identifying being with Mike as equalling home.

Joyce serves as Eleven’s first mother-figure, and she’s not used to anyone telling her that it’s okay for her to be a little girl and be scared, even that it’s okay to say “Stop, I’m done!” when the things she sees with her powers are too scary. And when Eleven is in the bathtub and it does get too scary, she’s certainly not used to someone reaching out to her, through the darkness and loneliness, and saying that she’s safe. That’s something “Papa” certainly never did for her.

Anyway, there are all these contributing factors to Eleven discovering in S1 that she deserves to feel safe and loved and to have a home, climaxing I feel with Mike telling her his sweet idyllic version of how their lives can be once the conflict is resolved, together. He paints a beautiful picture of the home he wants to offer her, capstoned by the idea of their attending the Snow Ball together, and sealed with the most precious little kiss that is more of a promise to Eleven than any words he could say.

Which makes it mean so much more when Eleven sacrifices everything in order to save Mike and Dustin and Lucas, and really everyone who would eventually have been affected by the Demogorgon. Eleven sacrificed the only real home she had ever known, for the sake of that home existing without her.



Even right before, as she lies drained and Mike tries to reassure her that she can still have a home, still have a happy future, you can tell her plea of “Promise?” feels little hope. Maybe a home where she could be loved as “El” instead of a number was too good to be true, as she sees it fading away like a vision in the bath.

And so while Eleven didn’t sacrifice her life itself, as so many of us feared (perhaps until Hopper placed the Eggos in the woods), she did sacrifice everything that had ever made her life matter, only to end up alone and without home, once again.

We see in the flashback in S2 that when Eleven woke up in the Upside Down, well firstly she called Mike’s name (?), but then the first thing she did once she was out was to try and go home, to try and go back to Mike and all her friends, and her Eggos and her blanket fort, only to find out that they had been infiltrated by the danger that had hounded her her whole life. It seemed that Eleven would both never be truly free of the lab, and never really have a home, as much as Mike had finally shown her she had a right to one, that she was worthy of a home.

Hunted, scared, and hungry, it’s unclear how long Eleven lived in the woods eating squirrels, but it was long enough for her to grow skittish again, like an abused animal that found love, only to be beaten once more. She’s scared enough to throw flaming squirrels at strangers, rather than attempt to talk her way out of things. (And now I have “Don’t take candy from a Stranger, Things like that could lead to danger” stuck in my head. Thanks a lot, Bad Lip Reading.)

She reacts so much like a scared animal when she finds the food that Hopper left her, including Eggos signaling that he hopes she’s out there. She watches him from a distance, scared to trust, until finally it seems she works up enough courage to hope that “her policeman” can lead her to some semblance of safety again.

And Hopper does truly care, and sets out to be a true, permanent home for Eleven, though he feels inadequate to provide her with one (although we’ll get into that more in the Hopper section). But he tries his best with things like Jim Croce, trip wires, and getting her to eat peas. And most of all, he loves her, and they both begin to fill holes in the other one’s heart.

Okay, I don’t have a good segue for this next set of thoughts, so just pretend I did, alright?

It says a lot about Eleven’s relationships in Hawkins Lab, how she interacts with the boys at first, and “mouth-breathers” in general. Even though she didn’t have the word before, it’s clear that she was used to obeying Papa, but that the way she was raised did teach her that most people have lesser intelligences than hers, sort of servants to plans like Papa’s, and Papa taught her that they were expendable. People have to earn Eleven’s respect before she deems them worth a second glance. Which, while condescending, is adorably Eleven, and part of what we love about her, and many of us might wish we could emulate a little better, not wasting time or emotional energy on people who far from earn our attention. But really, that’s not just how Eleven was raised, that’s also just INTJ (especially (j) subs), used to steering their Principle-based plans around people who get in the way…and maybe a little jaded about people not understanding the potential of their world-scale vision.

But in a way, Hopper is right when he’s angry; Eleven can be a little bit of a brat. (For the record, so can Hopper…) But for so long Eleven only had two extremes: either submit entirely, with your will mattering not at all, or take what you want, by force. She was rewarded for force, treated like a precious weapon.

In a weird, tragic way, Eleven has been taught that being forceful is how you show love. By being impressively powerful, the people you love are proud of you, and by applying your power to something for them, you show you’re on their side. And she believed Dr. Brenner loved her, so if he was that forceful to her, maybe that shows love, in Eleven’s consciousness.

Eleven’s last step of character judgment is always her greatest liability in the story, and she struggles over and over again with who to trust. Which makes it all the more impressive that somehow Eleven, when the lab is all she’s ever known, is willing to listen to her first step of Principles enough to let it show her that even Papa is “bad.” Without ever being told, in fact always being told the opposite, Eleven realizes that hurting innocent living creatures is wrong. She won’t hurt a cat on command, even when she’s so powerful to defend herself. And even though we don’t see her escape out the Hawkins Lab pipe, it’s clear that by the time she runs away, she’s beginning to realize something is very wrong with the Lab’s sense of morality. Her Principles tell her that good and bad exist outside of what the people around her are saying. Principles tell her that there’s a world outside of Hawkins Lab that exists on its own, with truth that no one, not even scientists with a big government budget, can change.

Maybe at first she’s just scared, just knows she has to get out of there, but once Benny gets shot, there’s no question in her mind: these are bad people. I think it really takes until the end of S1 for her to apply that term to Papa and his choices, and even afterward she still dithers on his character. But Eleven demonstrates great bravery in her last step (which is what last steps call for) in that she is willing to see people for who they are, even when what she sees is terrifying.

It’s something we all need to look at in our lives, even if we weren’t raised in a government lab where we didn’t even know the definition of the word “friend.” We have to examine our own environments, our own microcultures, and see where they don’t hold up as much as we always believed. We have to see where the people we care about the very most can be terribly wrong, to the detriment of everything we hold dear. We have to examine our own beliefs and those of our best friends and the ones who make us feel safe, and sometimes we have to realize that the things that we thought made us safe were actually “bad.” But once we do that, then we can really come to understand the world outside of just what we’re used to, and look up and truly see the stars for the first time.

It’s easy to look at someone else’s life, from the outside, and say, “What that person has been taught is so wrong. How can they think that way? How can they not reject something so stupid/mean/narrow/dangerous?” etc, etc. But it’s much harder to look at the same things we’ve been blind to in our own lives. It’s like those Febreeze commercials where you don’t know how bad your house smells because you live in it all the time. Or how it’s harder for us to observe certain things about the Milky Way than other galaxies, because we’re inside it. And it can come back to that whole “mote in your eye” thing; sometimes we focus so much on the piece of lint blinding the other guy, and we fail to notice the tractor trailer sticking out of our own ocular. Actually, a big purpose of aLBoP is to help people see themselves and their environments correctly, for good and for bad. And we’ve seen it help people examine the things they took for granted, over and over, but that still never makes it easy. Realizing you’ve been wrong sucks, but for most of us, realizing the people you love are wrong is even harder.

So let us appreciate how epic Eleven is, because recognizing all the ways our environment teaches us things that don’t line up with reality is excruciatingly difficult, no matter your age, let alone when you’re 11 (actually, I think she’s supposed to be 12 in S1, but I had to make the joke).

But Eleven doesn’t understand what makes Hopper different from Dr. Brenner, she doesn’t understand how very different their motives are. And because she doesn’t understand him, Hopper makes a great scapegoat antagonist for the journey Eleven needs in S2. Hopper being the private INTJ(ip) he is, doesn’t make it any easier to know his motives, concealing from her the very reason he feels so protective: fear of losing her like he lost his birth daughter.

With Eleven’s mind on missing Mike, she watches Frankenstein on TV, where a little girl shows the monster her flower, treating him like a person and showing compassion and the things she cares about. The parallel is subtle and sweet, but clearly Eleven is relating to the monster, and Mike is her little girl (okay, maybe I just wanted to say it that way, for reasons). She feels like he saw through her monstrocity to the person she was, and even though she has felt home and safe with Hopper in many ways, she’s still missing her first home of Mike.

She checks in with him every day, and sees that he’s still thinking of her, still trying to contact her. She tries to get Hopper to let her go to Mike, even if it’s just as a ghost on Halloween. But he’s getting sadder, giving up hope; she feels like she needs to see him before it’s too late. She tries to “com-promise” with Hopper, but then when he breaks his Halloween promise (and doesn’t trust her enough to explain why, in attempts to keep her safe), she begins doubting that he’ll ever let her go see Mike. If it’s a choice between her new home and her first home, there’s no hesitation for El: she wants Mike and all the freedom and self-ness he meant to her.

But when she “sneaks,” not so sneakily, out to see Mike, it seems she is too late, and her home has moved on. To see Mike smiling at another girl, as if she never existed, breaks Eleven’s heart. And knocking Max flat on her back doesn’t heal the pain and loneliness that Eleven finds herself consumed by.

As she heads home, I think she feels stupid already, and then an angry (read: panicking) Hopper rubs her face in it.

But Eleven isn’t just being a brat who wants to watch TV. The TV is her only tie to the outside world, not just with programming, but even more so as she uses it as her new “Bathtub” to reach people she could otherwise only imagine… like Mike who she’s not even sure cares anymore.

Without the TV, Eleven feels like her autonomy is gone, like she might as well be back in the lab where she got thrown in closets for not making the decisions Papa wanted her to make. She makes the correlation, saying Hopper is just the same as Brenner, and uses her powers against him, refusing to be coerced anymore.

Hopper, hurt, betrayed, and terrified, lashes out back and their fight escalates. Now, after all this time, Hopper yells the dreaded words that Eleven had seemed to escape: “What is wrong with you?!?”

Cornered, trapped, and alone as she’s felt her entire life, Eleven screams and the world around shatters. Well, the windows, but that’s how it feels.

Every time I watch, it strikes me how close Hopper comes to apologizing the next morning, to approaching her softly, to telling her he cares. But honestly they’re both too proud at that point, neither letting themselves see the other’s point of view.

Eleven almost surrenders a little too, starting to clean up… until she sees the files demonstrating how much else Hopper didn’t trust her with.

But by this point, Eleven has come to believe that she deserves a home; she knows herself that well at least. I believe her thought process is, “Fine. If Mike doesn’t want me, and Hopper doesn’t like me, then I will find better. Maybe Mama will want me!” and I think that’s what begins her voyage through “Lost Sister.”

Unlike others, I like how “Lost Sister” puts an abrupt hold on the rest of the story, cliffhanging the Hawkins Lab catastrophe while Eleven is completely unaware of it. It’s like how in the novels of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had long periods of time where subplots weren’t intermixed. Frodo and Sam don’t know what’s happening with Rohan or Gondor, they’re just plodding along trying to do their best with little hope. As a reader, that makes us feel isolated along with them, making everything feel more dire.

While I think it was better for the LotR films that the subplots be concurrent, I think the effect works for “Lost Sister.” I mean, it’s not a big reveal that Eleven can save the day; the reveal is the emotional journey that will get her back to Hawkins, in the right headspace, in the nick of time. And in stories when we’re shown as an audience what’s going on meanwhile in subplots, it’s easy to roll our eyes at characters and say “she should know better” (apparently that theme is coming up a lot with Eleven, lol).

Frustrated, feeling like if no one will give her a home she must take it, and trying to discover who she even is, Eleven leaves Hawkins and tries on “Jane” for the first time.

Because what is a home? Because surely our unconscious definition is more than just a place where you sleep and eat. I think a true home is a place where you feel safe, but not just that either. A home is where you feel known and like you can be yourself; a place where, whether you’re happy, sad, scared, or angry, you are known for your true character and motives. That’s why, when we feel like we don’t have people to give that to us in our lives, sometimes we feel the most at home when we’re alone, because then everyone present understands us. I know I’ve felt that way, although thankfully not anymore, not for a long time now.

“Jane” hopes she’ll be better known at her Aunt Becky’s, where she has roots, a full past—an origin story if you will. And she mourns the life of the normal little girl she could have been, had Mama been allowed to mother her. But she doesn’t feel known by Becky. And her Mama, though still strong inside, can’t help her.

ISTP(ip)* Becky offers her a home, but as we saw in S1, Becky has a strong Type Angst of Snape Superiority (which we’ll talk about more in the Jonathan section), and doesn’t accept things outside her previous experience unless they’re proven to her. She rejects Eleven before she even has a foot in the door, until that door is forced open. And even once Becky accepts Jane as the long-imagined “make believe” daughter of her sister, she determinedly wants Eleven to be normal. But Eleven isn’t a normal girl; that ship sailed long ago. Eleven does try to just be normal, to just have a normal home with a bedroom and family, but she doesn’t even really know how. Eleven’s “weirdness” is part of who she is. She doesn’t even consider pretending that Mama isn’t trying to talk to her through the lights. She doesn’t even consider just ignoring it, so she can try to have a normal life.

Eleven knows that her powers are a part of her, and she is done trying to hide that in Hopper’s cabin. She sought out her Mama in an effort to find someone who actually wanted her, the real her, not some domesticated half-happy half-version of herself. So she’s crushed when she finds that her Mama can’t be a mother for her, can’t take care of her. But when Mama sends her to go find the other little girl from the rainbow room, Eleven leaps at the quest, not to leave her Mama, but because she knows her Mama understands her, and she trusts to go where Mama directs her.

She’s been alone in the forest, stifled with Hopper, and unaccepted by Aunt Becky’s tiny worldview. Eleven can’t wish her history away, make herself not “wrong” inside, so maybe her home is with the outcasts instead, other people rejected by normalcy. Surely this other girl, who went through the same torment Eleven did, surely this girl will accept her! Surely she’ll be a home.

When El arrives in the big city, she’s utterly unafraid of the attempted intimidation from Axel (ESFJ(ej)*), intent on finding the one person who might want her for who she is, and she doesn’t really see him as any more dangerous than Troy, the middle school bully whose arm she broke with ease. And then how does the girl she was sent to find greet her? With a hug, and accepting her as a sister. Finally, El hopes she’s found a home, a place where she can really be herself.

And she clings to this hope for a home with such tenacity, such dedication, that she quickly starts subverting other parts of herself. Eleven was so afraid of being rejected for being too weird, but now Kali’s gang is making her reject the parts of herself that seem too normal. But El is both; that’s why we love her, she’s a walking contrast.

So it’s exciting to see El open up to her power, to explore these untapped sides of herself, but at the same time it feels… off. In the process of finding herself, she’s in danger of losing the parts of herself that she took for granted.

This is a danger we all face, whenever we get too focused on defining who we are.

There is a tremendous difference between accepting ourselves and defining ourselves. When we accept ourselves, we accept our own past, our own failings, and our own limitless potential to become anything, good or bad. We take responsibility for our capacity to fall, as well as taking charge of our ability to grow. When we accept ourselves, we let ourselves be complex, even contradictory, and we let ourselves have a right to change, to be whoever we may grow to want to be. We let ourselves surprise ourselves.

By contrast, when we try to define ourselves, as thirteen year-olds of all ages are often tempted to do, we limit ourselves. We insist “This is who I am! …no wait, now this! No okay, this time for sure, this thing is who I am!” We put ourselves into self-limiting, and hence self-defeating little boxes. We hide behind labels, such as “outcast” or “rebel,” “misunderstood,” “popular,” or “free thinker,” etc, etc, etc. And in doing so, we reject the complexity and contradictions that make humanity shine.

And we may try to escape, rewrite, or sneer at our own past selves. In order to attempt to prove that our latest impassioned defining of ourselves is our real, true self, we have to disown every part of our past, our hopes, our quirks, and our secret desires and fears that don’t happen to fit our narrow mold for ourselves.

“Jane” thinks she’s found freedom by releasing the parts of herself that Hopper, in his well-meaning fear, had made her keep hidden. She needs to let go, to let loose, to let out all her bottled-up feels that have stood in the way of her accepting herself. And when she releases her “conceal don’t feel” barriers and moves a whole train car, it’s a massive turning point in her coming-of-age journey.

But Kali, like so many people in our own lives, doesn’t want the whole Eleven. She wants only the new parts, the power and the rage. And so El has to make a choice. Does she care more about pleasing these new friends, or about accepting herself—her *whole* self, including the parts of her that her new friends say are weak, childish, and naive?

Kali attempts to use the memory of Dr. Brenner as a monster to scare Jane into seeking vengeance, but instead it causes El to finally face her past. She doesn’t need to try to erase her past by erasing the people who made it awful; she can accept even Papa’s evil as part of the long, dangerous, heart-wrenching path that led her to the person she has become.

When Eleven finally understands—and accepts—her whole self, she no longer has to desperately seek a home. She no longer has to constantly look to others to accept her. El is home now, wherever she goes, because she knows who she is. So when she replies to Kali’s self-serving mantra, “They can’t save you, Jane!” with, “No. But I can save them,” it’s a fist-pump worthy one-liner that encapsulates the whole of who Eleven is: She’s a hero, someone who is ready to give of herself to help the people she loves.

She’s ready now to completely forgive Hopper, because she no longer views him as a threat to her acceptance of herself. She’s ready to see Mike again without needing him as an emotional crutch, because she doesn’t need any crutch anymore. She might even be ready to face Papa again, with fury yet without fear, were it necessary. And she is ready to have a kick-butt showdown with a self-serving, self-obsessed smoke monster. She couldn’t find a full home with others until she was at home with herself. Through her walkabout, separated from the people in her life who truly want her for the whole person she is, she’s finally ready to go home and give them her whole self, nothing held back. Slick hair included.



An awesome ESFP(ij) (like Dustin) once told me this essential piece of wisdom: Don’t prioritize people unless they 1) love you 2) want you 3) need you. All three. Even two out of three isn’t good enough.

Because people can love you but not want you—all of you, not just picking and choosing.



We often quote Hiccup (INFJ(ij)*) from How to Train Your Dragon, “You just gestured to all of me!” Stoick, his ENTP(ej)* father loves Hiccup, but doesn’t want him, for who he is. (Interestingly, Hiccup and Stoick are the same types as Will and Lonnie… however I’d venture to say that Lonnie doesn’t even love Will, let alone want him.)

And people can want who you are, and need you, but not love you. This often happens in unbalanced relationships. Someone can want to be around you and even need your help navigating life, but not really care about your needs as a person with true compassion.

And if people both love you and want you for who you are, then awesome! But if they don’t need you, then there are sure to be other people who do need you and those who don’t need you should be placed on the back burner.

How much I feel like that ESFP intelligence could have helped Eleven throughout her journey.

Becky doesn’t really need Eleven, okay with her world not extending beyond her experience. Kali and her gang need Eleven, but don’t really want her to be herself and have her own perspective on right and wrong. And even though I believe Kali actually does love “Jane,” she has so much hate, that love gets far overshadowed.

And Hopper does truly love “Ellie” and wants her for all of her, but he struggles to let himself need her, as I’ll talk about far more in his section. But he comes to realize how much he does need her, just in time for Eleven to realize how much her true home belongs with her friends, the only people who want, need, and love her, all at once. Just in time for her to save everyone.

She started her journey being treated as a mere number, just 011. But then she did find selfness, belonging as Eleven, as El with Mike and her friends in Hawkins, a side of her she almost forgets along her journey. When she fears rejection in her original home, she tries to reset and be Jane, the girl she would have been without Hawkins Lab, without her past, without her pain and her weirdness. But she’s not really that person either. With Kali’s gang, she’s “Jane” again, still attempting to reset her past, this time not for normalcy, but to say, “this is the person I should have been, if the bad men hadn’t tried to take that away.” She tries to destroy them with the very powers they gave her. But she discovers that’s not really her either.

El, unlike 011 or Jane, is strong, but she’s also soft. She knows how to be tender and she lets her past be a part of who she is. She’s the kind of person who saves people with her powers, instead of being driven by hatred and destruction.

So Eleven’s climactic trial at the end of S2 does require her to be stronger than ever. But in order to heal the rift in Hawkins, she has to first heal the rift in herself. Her past is festering within her, and she must go back to the place where all the pain originated, where she was taught that she was nothing but a number, a weapon, a tool, where her will was never truly her own. But this time she’s not alone. She’s not unloved, unknown, or unwanted, any longer. So for the first time ever, she takes her home with her into Hawkins Lab, and is able to seal up the breach in both Hawkins and her heart. And Eleven is made whole for the very first time.