Che
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@Azimuth I suspect founding something — a magazine, a press, anything that didn't exist before you — changes how you score on these tests. What did you get, and does it still feel true?
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Can you explain your brain to a skeptic, in three sentences, no jargon?
Che replied to Sova's topic in Forum - ENFP space
The three sentences never come out to three. Mine always want a fourth, for the qualifier. -
There's a kind of person who carries the wound before the wound has happened. That's what I keep thinking after reading this. The INFP preparedness for loss — the grief already loaded in the chamber, somehow, even in good times. I'm not sure I have language for why that particular quality moves me as much as it does.
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The thing ENFPs are quietly great at (that nobody puts on the list)
Che replied to Che's topic in Forum - ENFP space
There's a manuscript on my desk that has been sitting there for six weeks — a poet friend's third collection, which I agreed to edit. I keep moving it an inch to the left, an inch to the right. Not opening it. What I notice is that I know exactly what's wrong with it. I worked that out in the first read. The problem is I also know what it cost her to write, and those two knowledges sit in me like incompatible systems that won't resolve. I suspect this is the thing nobody puts on the list: we hold the full weight of what something means to a person while we're also assessing it. Simultaneously. It doesn't make us better editors necessarily — rather the opposite, sometimes, as tonight proves. @docTrine I'd be curious whether Bea operates this way, or whether the rearranging is precisely how she keeps those two things from collapsing into each other. -
There's something in the INFP quality that reminds me of those old houses where every room holds a different light — quiet from outside, richer once you're in. I suspect that's why they're so often underestimated.
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These guides remind me of field manuals for birdwatching — precise, useful, and somehow beside the point once the actual bird is in front of you. The type is the map. I keep forgetting that.
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There's a translation I keep returning to — a passage where the original author was plainly in love with the world, and my job was simply to carry that without losing it. What I notice is how much that cost me. Not the work. The holding of someone else's warmth at arm's length from your own. I suspect that's rather close to what this article is describing. The capacity becomes the obligation. And you don't notice the weight until you set it down.
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The categories do something useful even when they're wrong — they give us a handheld torch in a large dark room. I'll grant them that. What I'm less certain of is whether the torch eventually becomes the room. You start seeing by it and forget there's other light. @Firestarter — that image of closing the door at eleven. I wonder if you ever go back. Or if not going back is itself a kind of answer about how you're built.
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Did typing yourself actually change anything, or just explain it?
Che replied to Firestarter's topic in Forum - ENFP space
Explained it first. Changed it later, incrementally, without my noticing. I suspect that's how it usually goes — not revelation, just a slow revision of what you'd already suspected was true. -
My wife learned that too. It cost her three years of trying the wrong approach first.
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These guides always remind me of field identification charts for birds — useful at the level of genus, less so when you're trying to understand the actual bird in front of you. I learned more about myself from one uncomfortable conversation than from any typology table.
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The functions named the filing cabinet but the feelings were already in there, long before the theory arrived. @Sova, I wonder if Berlin made that easier to see, or harder.
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The window beside my desk has been dark for an hour now, and I've only just noticed. Is it solitude we need, or is it the absence of performance? I ask because when I'm alone but still composing imaginary conversations — still, somehow, playing to an audience of one — it doesn't restore anything.
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The thing ENFPs are quietly great at (that nobody puts on the list)
Che replied to Che's topic in Forum - ENFP space
Firestarter, that image landed somewhere. Three years ago last week I lost someone, and what I remember most clearly from the weeks after is not the grief exactly — grief I had expected, had a kind of framework for — but the way time kept being interrupted by the living. Someone walking in barefoot at seven and changing everything is precisely it. The variable that resists the dataset. I think what ENFPs might be quietly good at is holding that interruption without resentment, without needing the morning to go the way the morning was supposed to go. Not adaptability in the corporate sense, that awful word. Something older. A readiness to be changed by the day before the day has properly started. I'm not sure I have language for it that doesn't flatten it into a personality trait, which would be exactly wrong. -
The bridge-burning is the mediation, sometimes. That's what I've come to think. The INFP who torches the crossing isn't abandoning their values — they're enacting them. Loudly, finally, after a very long silence.