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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“The way toward wholeness is made of wrong turns and fateful detours.” —Carl Jung

“People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.” —Ramona L. Anderson

“I know the potential of my depth scares most people because for many years it terrified me. I would shop, sleep, drink, use drugs, travel, work, eat, jog, flirt, go to bars, dance, have sex, go to school, have hobbies, read books, get married, have a child, quit work, fast…anything just to avoid getting to know my inner self.

[…]

“Until recently, I have always attracted myself to superficial people—an obvious mirror reflection of myself at the time. Because the power within myself scared me, I allowed myself to choose external distractions while avoiding getting to know my internal self.

[…]

“This is just one of the many reasons I chose to become a writer. To sit down and discuss subjects like this with others face-to-face is draining on both of us. Writing allows enough food for thought to others and myself without becoming a hefty tax on the energy supplies and provides a safe, non-threatening forum whereby the reader can put the message down at any time and return to it when he or she is ready. Writing puts boundaries on our fears and acts as a protective barrier against mental, emotional, physical and spiritual stress.”

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“I haven’t written for a few days because I wanted, first of all, to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary; not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor for that matter anyone else—will be interested in the unbosomings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write but, more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.

“There is a saying that ‘paper is more patient than man’; it came back to me on one of my slightly melancholy days, while I sat chin in hand, feeling too bored and limp even to make up my mind whether to go out or stay at home. Yes, there is no doubt that paper is patient and, as I don’t intend to show this carboard-covered notebook bearing the proud name of ‘diary’ to anyone, unless I find a real friend, boy or girl, probably nobody cares. And now I come to the root of the matter, the reason for my starting a diary: it is that I have no such real friend.

“Let me put it more clearly, since no one will believe that a girl of thirteen feels herself quite alone in the world, nor is it so. I have darling parents and a sister of sixteen. I know about thirty people whom one might call friends. I have strings of boy friends, anxious to catch a glimpse of me and who, failing that, peep at me through mirrors in class. I have relationships, aunts and uncles, who are darlings too. A good home. No…I don’t seem to lack anything. But it’s the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. We don’t seem to be able to get any closer, that is the root of the trouble.

“Hence, this diary. In order to enhance in my mind’s eye the picture of the friend for whom I have waited so long, I don’t want to set down a series of bald facts in a diary like most people do, but I want this diary itself to be my friend…”

Anne Frank
Saturday, June 20, 1942

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.