INFP Introverts: The 64-Color Box

Here’s what I hear:

* sensitive—“must be gay” (am not)
* nice person/genuine
* opinionated but fair-minded (tolerant)
* thinks too much
* not focused
* can get into head trips
* literal learner/thinker (meaning you have to spell it out if it starts getting too abstract like chemistry)
* always late
* stares into space
* not good at understanding other’s motives (am a sucker for what looks like honest emotion and am manipulated this way)
* has a sense of wonder
* great moderator
* brown-noser
* petty
* he’s a good guy
* have a hard time asking for what’s mine

I’m an INFP adoptee. Talk about confusing trying to learn who you are. Adopted parents test as ENFJ and INFJ. Birthparents, I believe, are INFP (bmom) and INTP (bfather), but with a lot of childhood damage that was never fixed so they’re a bit strange to me. With my adopted parents, I felt like I was raised in bootcamp, “Hut, hut, hut!” Those J’s are tyrannical. Along with the T’s.

Someone else mentioned it wasn’t okay to be themselves in their family. This was me, also. I became an ENTJ to be okay growing up. Didn’t have a clue who I was until late my 20’s. Thank God I waited until 40 to get married. I would’ve been divorced twice by now.

Was popular in high school. Was the one popular person who also identified with the outcasts. Seemed to find what everyone had in common and built on that.

Started work in Corporate America. Got fired—was too honest when the blame bottle spinned on me. Honesty is NOT the best policy in the working world. Lesson learned.

Can relate to the guy who talked about team sports being somewhat of a struggle. The team-bonding thing is so much easier if you’re an extroverted non-sensitive man.

I dated many women. I always found that they liked me and said what a great father I would be. But did this matter to them? In large part, no. They still married—or got excited about—the alpha, non-emotional, screw-them-in-business, have-an-affair-but-you-get-a-big-lifesyle guys.

I listen to some of them complain about their husbands now but I don’t feel sorry for them. They wanted that. This led me to learn to change the people I hung out with. I agree with someone who said “find people who appreciate you for you.” That’s a great demonstration of good self-esteem and one that took me until 40 to learn.

My wife is also an INFP. It’s not easy being married to someone who’s like you in terms of sexual chemistry. I find the sexual attraction thing more with other personality types—the women T’s and J’s. But, this I learned, had more to do with my associating intimacy with rejection (or someone not getting me).

The sparks weren’t as bright with my wife at first but, man, we are friends through everything. I think that’s the healthier way to go.

Definitely not what you’d see on Oprah. Forget what our culture says about you “just knowing.” It’s bull crap coffee table stuff. I know people who’ve said that and gotten divorced a few years later. Essentially, they married their opposites and it didn’t last. The gulf was too wide. Either that or their marriages didn’t resemble anything more than lifestyle/economic arrangements.

I would say heaven and earth are themes for me—trying to balance the practical with the spiritual. Oh, how I envy those who are comfortable not asking the big questions! Sometimes, I wish I could just go on with my life like they do and work, accumulate, then die—without ever having to get my brain messy. Instead, I’m absorbed with “what did that mean?” over and over.

Still I wouldn’t trade my INFP status. I think the rest of the population needs us to bring things from unreality into reality. We are that bridge. To my way of thinking, it makes them all drones.

I found a way to make money in a niche advertising business where I’m my own boss. I don’t have to dress up, impress a boss, show up for meetings on time or kiss anyone’s ass. I recommend this if you can find it. I think INFPs are sort of scapegoated in groups at work.

Peace to you all.

Related: Male INFPs/HSPs (2)

“I think modern society—especially in the United States—has a set of biases that make it difficult for sensitive men to learn about, and come to terms with, their sensitivity. Apart from those who simply ignore the possibility that they might be a HSM, I think there are also significant numbers who may be aware of their sensitivity, but are hesitant or afraid that anyone else might find out. Sadly, I get the sense that most HS men live lives of quiet suffering—many choosing to ‘narcoticize’ the pain of not fitting in with alcohol, drugs, or other addictions. Maybe you’re an HSM, reading these words. And maybe you’ll recognize yourself, somewhere in all this. In retrospect, I can now look at many ‘choice points’ in my life where my being a HSM had an influence on the…”

Continue reading “Highly-Sensitive Men: The Hidden HSPs?”

“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.”

Source

“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

“It was scary as a child because there was nobody to relate to. Neither my auntie nor my friends, nor anybody, could ever see what I did. It was very, very scary and the only contact I had was reading about an Oscar Wilde, or a Dylan Thomas, or a van Gogh—all those books that my auntie had that talked about their suffering because of their visions. Because of what they saw, they were tortured by society for trying to express what they were.

“In one way or another, I was always hip. I was hip in kindergarten. I was different from the others. There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things people didn’t see. I always saw things in a hallucinatory way. This thing gave me a chip on the shoulder; but, on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted. Part of me would like to be accepted by all facets of society and not be this lunatic musician. But I cannot be what I am not.

“You make your own dream. That’s the Beatles’ story, isn’t it? That’s what I’m saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders. Don’t expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself. That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called ‘holy’ and worshipped for the covers and not the contents, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be. There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. You can wake you up.

“It’s fear of the unknown. The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened by it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that—it’s all illusion. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it’s unknown and it’s plain sailing. Everything is unknown—then you’re ahead of the game. That’s what it is. Right?”

—John Lennon

Continue reading…

“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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The Gere Foundation*

Richard Gere: My Journey as a Buddhist

“This planet can’t exist anymore unless all peoples are taken into account.” —Richard Gere

“Life, says Erasmus’s Folly, is theater: we each have lines to say and a part to play. One kind of actor, recognizing that he is in a play, will go on playing nevertheless; another kind of actor, shocked to find he is participating in an illusion, will try to step off the stage and out of the play. The second actor is mistaken. For there is nothing outside the theater, no alternative life one can join instead. The show is, so to speak, the only show in town. All one can do is to go on playing one’s part, though perhaps with a new awareness, a comic awareness.” —JM Coetzee

“To his fellow recruits, he presented himself as nondescript: simple, bland, unassuming—just another face in the crowd. With his regular looks, he passed for ordinary so easily that most people believed him when he insisted, as he did so often in later years, that he was a ‘nothing,’ a ‘nobody,’ an ‘uncomplicated man with ordinary interests,’ although anyone who could attract attention to himself by being so sensitive and insecure had to be complicated.”*

“It was through his comic strip—an environment he controlled—that Schulz truly lived. Charlie Brown allowed Schulz to speak even less as himself in real life. Schulz’s characters became muses, creating life for themselves—and Schulz—in the process.”*