MBTI Type: ISFP

Norah has kept feelings about her mother’s suicide locked away in her head for a long, long time, and they have somewhat derailed her life—she is quick to stomp out of a job when she’s fired for dropping a tray (after tripping), but she rarely showed up on time in the first place, preferring to hang out with her friends, do drugs, and sometimes drink and sleep in rather than go to work. When her sister starts a business in which they clean up dead people’s messes for a living, Norah initially doesn’t want to do it, then starts having feelings about the environment she’s in. Finding photos of an older woman and her daughter makes Norah wonder if the woman has loved ones, and if they know she’s dead. Against her sister’s advice, she finds the woman’s daughter and makes friends with her, because she wants to give her the photos but doesn’t know how to not be awkward about it. When it finally happens, it goes badly and Norah gets upset, because she didn’t know how to separate her own feelings from what happened (“I wish I had my mom…” so the assumption is, this woman may wish she knew about hers). Norah takes her friend “tresling,” where you stand on a crossbeam under the railroad tracks when a train rushes past, since it’s the “ultimate thrill.” She also lights a candle to clean the smell out of a dead person’s house and, in chasing a kitten outside, accidentally sets the place on fire. She tells her nephew scary stories to thrill him with, and ignores the fact that his mother told her not to, because it gives him nightmares. Norah takes a friend to a house party, where all the people there want to do is get drunk and make out. She ends the film by going on a road trip with her cat. She has sought meaning all her life, searching for it in temporary distractions and pleasures, but also wanting to know why her mother abandoned her and what it means to her identity. Norah shows a lot of inferior Te. She believes her accidental setting of the house on fire proves how unequipped she is to deal with the real world, and sees herself as inept. She angrily storms off and leaves her sister to deal with a poop-soaked mattress after her sister laughs at her for falling on it.

Enneagram: 7w6 sp/sx

Norah hasn’t been the same since her mother died, and she’s allowed that experience to Norah has been running away from things her entire life, through distractions; she is somewhat irresponsible and cannot hold down a job, because she gets bored. She doesn’t want to do hard work, and feels like a “screw up” when she makes a mistake and burns down a client’s home (while she’s making sure a kitten is all right and doesn’t get lost). She overdoes it on drinking and thrills, going up on the trestle to feel the rain roar past, rather than sit with and deal with the pain of her mom’s death (she half-sobs about it, but also loves the thrill of being up there, inches from death). Whenever she makes a mistake, she makes excuses and/or starts to beat herself up for it (disintegrating temporarily into 1 “I am a bad person” self-accusations). At the end of the movie, she goes on a road trip with her new kitten just to avoid everything she’s left behind and “get away.” Her 6 wing is fun and family-minded, but also insecure. She doesn’t want to do things on her own if they are hard.