INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

“A somewhat strident message about why I write: If you think that money will protect you from potential pain and suffering, you are misguided. Money will certainly oil the wheels and give you a more comfortable ride but, when it comes to loss, pain, and suffering—when that hits, money will not get you out of it. Beauty fades, youth grows older, things change, success is relative. Love? Do you really know what that is? Have you gone beyond your own ego to find out? Do you know how many old people are fading away in geriatric homes, institutions, or stuck in some isolated little apartment somewhere? In this society, they are marginalised. They are out, finished. They are you/me/us some time down the line. If you are poor, who will value you? In this society, you count for almost nothing. If you are sick, or weak, or disabled in some way, will you be treated with respect, empathy, or dignity? And the religious institutions, the governments, the power brokers, the corporations, the media. Do they care? Are they compassionate? Are they humane, decent? We have our heads in the sand. I write to communicate what I truly feel. The outrage, the disappointment, the frustration, the sadness, the confusion. And I wonder—am I the only one who feels this way? Apparently not.” —Annie Lennox

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“And let me tell you something I’ve never told a soul. My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can’t strike them all by ourselves…we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment, we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn’t find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lit.

“If that happens, the soul flees from the body and goes to wander among the deepest shades, trying in vain to find food to nourish itself, unaware that only the body it left behind, cold and defenceless, is capable of providing that food. […] That’s why it’s important to keep your distance from people who have frigid breath. Just their presence can put out the most intense fire, with results we’re familiar with. If we stay a good distance away from those people, it’s easier to protect ourselves from being extinguished. […] You must, of course, take care to light the matches one at a time. If a powerful emotion should ignite them all at once they would provide a splendour so dazzling that it would illuminate far beyond what we can normally see; and then a brilliant tunnel would appear before our eyes, revealing the path we forgot the moment we were born, and summoning us to regain the divine origin we had lost. The soul ever longs to return to the place from which it came, leaving the body lifeless…”

—Laura Esquivel, “Like Water for Chocolate”

“On the whole, people don’t tell you to ‘lighten up’ because they’re concerned for your emotional well-being. They do it because they are uncomfortable with your feelings and because they don’t really want to go where you are.

“Because we all really only know what it’s like inside our own heads, it can take a while to figure out how you are different from other people. It’s taken me a long time to realize that I am, to a larger degree than normal, serious, passionate, imaginative and emotionally intense. Why is this something I’ve been shamed for?”

Continue reading “I Don’t Lighten Up”

“Ever since I was a tiny girl, I’ve been the kind of person who feels joy so intensely that it hurts. I would lie in bed, age 6, and press my hand down on my heart when I was really really happy because it felt like my heart would come out of my chest. When I’ve been in love with someone, that’s what it feels like.

“I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

“If I can’t love someone like that, if I have to ‘tone it down’ in order to get a mate, then obviously love is not for me. Because I can’t. I can’t tone it down. I have the presence of mind to know that that very intensity is really the best thing about me, and if I have a gift to give? It is THAT. And I can’t compartmentalize it - although I have tried that too.”

Continue reading “Me and Salieri”

“I joke that I knew James before he was sensitive,” Danny Kortchmar chuckles affectionately, “but the truth is that James is the archetypal singer-songwriter. He’s the mould, as a solo artist backed by a consistent touring band, writing confessional songs before almost anybody—songs that remained personal even as they became universal. Dylan achieved the universal aspect, but not the personal vulnerability.

“Working and touring with James for decades, I used to want him to rock out more—until I realized that what he wanted to do was actually calm people in a unique, quirky way. His songs sound like the blues, like Christmas carols, and like a church choir too, yet it all essentially comes only from him.”

“Fundamentally,” Ike Taylor told this writer in 1981, “James is a retiring person who wants and is able to be in meaningful contact with other people. At the one-on-one level, his shyness interferes. Paradoxically, that shyness disappears on-stage. I see family allusions in much of his work and a core confidence in the rightness of exposing his inner self. ‘Fire And Rain,’ for instance, was a great expression of his sensitivity but also of his will.”

[…]

“My son ministers through his music,” says Trudy Taylor. “He picks up the themes of what’s good in the past, and he gives them a unified clarity in the present.”

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“For me, I don’t have much direction or control over it. I don’t write or read music. But, generally speaking, I am visited by songs. They usually happen to me either while I’m sitting and playing guitar or sometimes when I’m driving the car. ‘Sweet Baby James’ happened while I was driving down south. You have to be ready to catch those things when they come, you know, ‘cause they’ll just fall right through and you’ll forget them. I write lots of songs that I guess you could call remedial, that are sort of therapeutic. Sometimes, I feel uncomfortable with that, as though they are too sticky and sentimental; but that’s what I do, that’s the kind of song I write.” —James Taylor

There are those who, on hearing that the tintype photographer John A. Coffer lives without car, phone or plumbing, might call him a Luddite. This, he insists, is not true — for one thing, he has a computer. He even has a computer room. The walls are bales of hay, the roof is tin, and the power source is a 75-watt solar panel outside in the pasture. Mr. Coffer, who lives on a 48-acre farm in the Finger Lakes, built his computer room in March. It’s lasted nicely through heavy rains and if it falls apart, Mr. Coffer says, no matter: He’s invested all of $15 in it.

The big question: why does Mr. Coffer choose to live like this? “Modern living was always too fast for me,” he said. “I was not good at 20th-century living.”

“I used to do all that, go to singles bars,” Mr. Coffer said. “It was cheap. It just wasn’t fulfilling. I don’t want to live up to other people’s expectations. I own this land, 50 acres free and clear. I’ve got a lot of money in the bank. I’ve been in galleries in New York. And yet girls go, ‘He doesn’t have a phone.’ ” Mr. Coffer rarely curses, but speaking about women, he does. They’ll chase down a guy 10 feet in debt over his head, working at some dead-end job, who’s got a phone and a car, he said angrily.

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“People always feel compelled to sum you up, to presume that they have you and can describe you. But there are many stories inside of me and a lot I want to achieve outside of one flat note.” —H. Ledger

“I’m shy. People get confused. They think, as an actor you can get up and be confident on the screen. Why aren’t you like this in normal life? Why can’t you act in your social life? Because I can’t!” —H. Ledger

David Foster Wallace: Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally-retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally-retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world.

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies C.P.R. to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.

Fiction’s about what it is to be a human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary United States that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now.

I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.

We’ve all got this “literary” fiction that simply monotones that we’re all becoming less and less human, that presents characters without souls or love, characters who really are exhaustively describable in terms of what brands of stuff they wear, and we all buy the books and go like “golly, what a mordantly effective commentary on contemporary materialism!”

But we already “know” U.S. culture is materialistic. This diagnosis can be done in about two lines. It doesn’t engage anybody. What’s engaging and artistically real is, taking it as axiomatic that the present is grotesquely materialistic, how is it that we as human beings still have the capacity for joy, charity, genuine connections, for stuff that doesn’t have a price? And can these capacities be made to thrive? And if so, how, and if not why not?

The magic of fiction is that it addresses and antagonizes the loneliness that dominates people.

I wanted to know what invisible thing compelled a person to read a certain book and turn away from another. Well, he said, he was a 49-year-old executive who’d grown up in a privileged family in New England, and my novel is about a 14-year-old girl who grows up in an underprivileged family on a peach farm in the South. “There couldn’t be two more different worlds,” he said.

Did it come down to this—the discomfort of differences? Do we shy away from books that threaten to tamper with our perceptions and prejudices? Do we unwittingly gravitate to works that we suspect will affirm our own points of view? Are books meant to be places of refuge or remonstration? I’ve noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others. Did the tendency spill into our reading?

“Was reading my novel painful?” I teased.

“Actually, it was,” he said, “but painful in a good way.” He went on to tell me about the surprising connection he’d made with adolescent Lily and the African American women in the book, these people with whom he supposedly shared 600 degrees of separation. “The characters got under my skin,” he confessed. “What can I say? I feel disposed now to the South, to black women and to white girls who need their mothers.”

With these words, he revealed to me a reason to write fiction: because it creates empathy.

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The Writing Life
How to summon forth the Secret Author Person within you.
By Laura Zigman
Book World, Washington Post

The first thing you should do when you decide you want to be a writer is to stop yourself from telling anyone you want to be a writer (stick a sock in your mouth if you have to). As a rule, most parents and guidance counselors (dream-killers) will try to dissuade you from following this career path (to nowhere). The root of their lack of support (extreme negativity) is that it’s a painfully unwise (foolish) ambition to have since very few writers earn a living from writing. You will be told:

- to be practical (”Why not try technical writing or corporate communications writing or computer software manual-writing?”)

- to get your head out of the clouds (”And how exactly will poetry pay the bills? The last time I checked, iambic pentameter was not an accepted currency.”)

- to realize that your notion of wanting a career you love can be disproved linguistically (”If work was supposed to be fun it would be called ‘fun,’ not ‘work.’ “)

Since you are young enough to still believe in yourself (instead of only in people who try to talk you out of believing in yourself), you will bring the subject up again (repeatedly, in an oddly masochistic “Groundhog Day” kind of way). You will then be lectured on:

- the value of a dollar (”You can’t just write more money.”)

- what it was like to be in the army (even if that army never actually went anywhere or did anything)

- what it was like growing up during the Depression (depressing).

To top it all off, you will be labeled a dreamer (and the only thing worse than being a dreamer is being a dreamer who is foolish enough to actually pursue a dream).

If you are like most people (me), before you know it, you will agree wholeheartedly with your naysayers. “What was I thinking?” you will say to yourself every time the urge to write surfaces like an unruly weed, which you and everyone else keep trying to beat to death. “What could I possibly have to say that hasn’t already been said by people a thousand times smarter than I will ever be?” Psychologists refer to this as the Stockholm Syndrome — when captives begin to share the views of their captors. You will so fully internalize their message and adopt it as your own that you will eventually forget it wasn’t your opinion to begin with.

You will now enter a long (seemingly placid but emotionally turbulent) period of denial that can sometimes last years (or decades). You will lie. “Who me? Be a writer? And put up with all that rejection? Are you kidding?” You will obfuscate. “Who would want to be a writer? Can you imagine being someone who wanted to be a writer?” When pressed, you will even philosophize: “If a writer writes something that never gets published and is thus never read, is a writer still a writer?”

In order to convince yourself and others that you have “moved on” (accepted defeat without even trying), you will learn to hide in plain sight: You will get a normal job, one with an actual office and an actual desk (engaging in “freelance work” from your apartment or working “odd jobs” with “odd hours” are dead giveaways of your true intentions and unconscious desires). In exchange for your 40 (or 50 or 60) hours a week of work (indentured servitude), you’ll receive a respectable paycheck (let’s be frank: not much more than you made waitressing in high school at the International House of Pancakes or working the drive-thru at Burger King) and medical benefits (to pay for psychotherapy, twice a week, to deal with the stress of all your repression). Most important, your job will provide you with some financial security and emotional stability (not to mention the perfect opportunity for people watching, eavesdropping, Internet research and working on something — Fiction? Nonfiction? Comedy? Tragedy? — even if you don’t yet know what that something is).

In addition to the macro-lie (yourself as Career Drone), you’ll see that you need to make up lots of little lies to protect your true identity (Secret Writer Person). You’ll have to appear ambitious and deserving of promotions (show up before noon); pretend to embrace any and all career-enhancing business trips and client interactions (even though you see any time away from your true calling as a soul-deadening, blood-sucking diversion); and continue to dress the part (never complaining about how dumb it is that you have to spend all your money on work clothes when you could be home writing your novel in your pajamas).

And then one day, out of the blue, just when you think you’re finally lost in the jungle, you will see it. You will look at all the papers and files and meaningless detritus on your desk, you will watch all your wonderfully idiosyncratic co-workers racing busily around the office, talking of Michelangelo, and you will stop whatever it is you are doing. The world you’ve tried so hard to join will suddenly cease to exist, and you will finally see that life without your dream is a wasteland; that you must at least try to do the thing you really want to do even if, in the end, you do not succeed at it. You will be tempted to put the better-to-have-loved-and-lost rule in parentheses, like everything else in your life that you’ve sidelined and tried to ignore up until now, but you will resist and settle for multiple hyphens instead. It is a step. You are about to head into the great unknown, and you will be tempted to throw away the map to your lost world in triumph, but don’t — you will need something to write on.

“Highly creative, artistic and spiritual, they can produce wonderful works of art, music and literature. INFPs are natural artists.”

“Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that, in most people, are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an ‘individual,’ each of them is a ‘multitude.’”

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“An INFP is a perfectionist who will rarely allow themselves to feel successful, although they will be keenly aware of failures.”*

Pathological vs. Positive Perfectionism
Source

Perfectionism has, sadly, been hyperpathologized by most mental health professionals, and hence, by popular culture at large. But such unequivocal vilification is unwarranted. 

Perfectionism is, in its purest and most benevolent form, a search for beauty, truth and goodness. Perfectionism is an inner calling to find and fulfill one’s destiny; to realize one’s potential; to pursue vigorously one’s unique vocation. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, vocation is “a feeling that one is called by God to a certain career or occupation.” 

But this feeling of being “called” doesn’t need to be couched in theological terms. It can be seen also as a secular calling, a strong proclivity or inclination of the self toward a particular type of work, trade or profession. 

In either case, when we, like the biblical Jonah, find the requisite courage to follow that inner “voice” of vocation, it is likely to lead us toward competency in our chosen field. When, on the other hand, we refuse the call, as did Jonah initially, we will likely wind up doing some kind of work about which we have no real passion. 

There is a relationship between passion and perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a form of passion. It is an expression of one’s passion for a particular vocation. For balance, form, harmony and wholeness. When one has passion for one’s work, perfectionism is the natural and normal expression of that passion. This is the positive, constructive type of perfectionism.

Positive perfectionism is not, as some assume, the compulsive worship of order and neatness, as we so often see in obsessive-compulsive disorder. This sort of pathological perfectionism is a neurotic denial of life’s inherent imperfection, and a vain attempt to fend off chaos, messiness, disease, suffering, anxiety and, finally, death itself. 

Neurotic, negative or pathological perfectionism can, in fact, impede creativity and competence. Placing unrealistic expectations and demands on one’s own work or that of others is fraught with problems ranging from resentment, shame and erosion of self-esteem, to blocked creativity due to fear of producing anything less than perfect.  

In such cases, psychotherapy can be helpful in accepting and embracing life’s pervasive imperfection. It is a perfectly imperfect world in which we live, inhabited by imperfect beings. 

Perfectionism, when not taken to neurotic extremes, acknowledges the inexorable reality and primacy of imperfection while at the same time heroically striving toward perfection nonetheless.

Non-pathological or positive perfectionism accepts its human limitations and the ultimate impossibility of attaining or sustaining perfection.

What the healthy or constructive perfectionist does is labor as passionately and perfectionistically as possible on a project, knowing all the while that he or she is destined to fail; but that despite the inevitability of failure, something good, something positive, something new, something worthwhile, something meaningful can come of the futile effort.

And, for the healthy, positive perfectionist, this makes the frustrating, arduous and sometimes tedious journey toward certain defeat a worthwhile and triumphant failure.

“It’s easy to make fun of the simple, soft-spoken man and the ‘unsophisticated’ personality that is reflected in the show and its characters. But behind everything is, in fact, a true sophistication. One that knows what children need and an amazing ability to let his real caring come through.

“In a very touching moment, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In receiving this award, he did not brag of his accomplishments. In his acceptance speech, he asked the audience to take ‘10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted the best for you in life. Ten seconds. I’ll watch the time.’

“Ten seconds of silence while accepting a major award…but it was the audience who began thinking, just as he had told them to. When the time was up and Mister Rogers told them how pleased those people would be to know how highly they were thought of, tears were on the faces of many of those hard-nosed show-biz types in the audience. He could really get to your feelings—and make you happy that he did.”*

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