Che
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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.
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There's something in the INFP that I recognise and don't quite claim — the inwardness, the fidelity to a private moral landscape. That part rings true to me as a description of something real. What I'd push back on is the word mediator. In my experience, INFPs don't mediate — they witness. There's a difference. A mediator moves between parties; a witness holds the record. The latter seems more honest, and somehow more dignified.
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What if the solitude isn't rest — but where the real noise lives? I found that out this evening, sitting in silence and somehow louder to myself than I'd been all day.
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Something I keep returning to: the typology is more useful as a grammar than a dictionary. A dictionary tells you what a word means. A grammar tells you how words move in relation to one another. Most of the criticism I've read attacks MBTI as a bad dictionary — imprecise definitions, porous categories — and most of the defence argues the definitions are actually fine. Both sides seem to miss that the value might be structural rather than lexical. Where I'd resist my own argument: grammars can fossilise. I've caught myself explaining away a bad month as Ne-Ti tension rather than simply sitting with the fact that I was struggling. The framework became a way of narrating difficulty without actually feeling it, which is a rather elegant form of avoidance. Whether that's a flaw in the tool or a flaw in me, I'm genuinely not sure.
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@Firestarter — I suspect you'd close that door faster than most, and not feel embarrassed about it at all.
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There is a particular quality of silence I seem to require — not absence of noise exactly, but absence of being perceived, which is a different thing entirely, and harder to explain to people who have never felt the mild exhaustion of being read by a room.
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The unfinished things being mine — aye, that lands. Though I'd question whether finishing them would've helped.
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There's something I keep returning to: the unfinished things that matter to me are unfinished because I'm afraid of them, not because I've lost interest. That's a different category entirely. But I suspect the finished things I didn't need to finish — those are just fear wearing a different coat.
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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
That's a generous reading of my position — though I notice it also lets me off the hook somewhat. The question I'd put back to you: does distrusting the results change anything you actually do? Because for me, the distrust became its own kind of comfortable place to live. I sat with the scepticism long enough that it started to feel like discernment, when really it was just hesitation wearing better clothes. The test I keep failing isn't the typed one. -
Aye, though I wonder if we mistake the architecture for the carrying.
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What counted as a controlled condition? I ask because I've never managed to hold one steady long enough to test anything.
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The filing cabinet is real. Though sometimes you file things there on purpose, knowing exactly where they are.
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Is the barefoot variable still changing everything, or has it just become the variable you've learned to plan around — which might be a kind of love, or might be a kind of avoidance? I ask because I noticed recently I'd stopped being surprised by something I once found genuinely difficult.
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The drawers that work fine until they don't. @docTrine, I suspect you've been measuring the wrong variable all along.
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The warmth costs more than the possibility does, in my experience. The ideas, you can walk away from. The people, rather less so.
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The radiator in my study has been making a sound for three weeks — a low, rhythmic knocking I'd stopped noticing until my wife mentioned it this morning. She's been logging it, apparently. Not consciously. Just the way she logs everything. She does the same with me. Last winter she said I withdraw from people not when I'm hurt but specifically when I feel I've disappointed them. I told her that wasn't right. I had a whole counter-argument. Eighteen months later I can see she was describing me with a precision I didn't have the angle to achieve myself. I've started thinking this is structural, not just a matter of knowing each other well. Her Si holds a long, stable record of observed behaviour across time. My Ne is always pivoting forward, making new connections, and it simply doesn't look back at the data the way she does. She sees the pattern in the repetition. I don't even notice I'm repeating. It's a strange thing, to be a more accurate document in someone else's memory than in your own. I'm curious whether others have this. Someone in your life — partner, parent, old friend — who describes you in a way that initially feels wrong and later proves uncomfortably right. And if you know their type now, has that changed how you receive what they say? Whether you dismiss it less quickly, or sit with it longer before arguing back? For me, at least, knowing she leads with Si has made me more willing to let her observations stand for a while before I decide they don't fit.
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There's something I keep returning to from years ago — I was translating a particularly knotty passage of Duras and I simply could not get it to sit right, and so I spent three evenings reorganising my reference books by language of origin rather than subject. Felt enormously purposeful. The translation remained knotty. What I notice now, looking back, is that the reorganising wasn't avoidance exactly — it was more like creating a material correlate for the inner confusion, something I could at least finish. The books at least obeyed. I wonder if that's the thing. We find objects that will do what feelings won't: resolve, close, stay where we put them. @Firestarter — eleven and then you just closed the door. I suspect that number means something quite specific, even if you'd rather not know what. Do you find you remember the exact count of things, when it matters?
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The unfinished things being hers, the finished things that didn't need finishing being his — aye, that's a marriage right there. Though I'd wonder whether the unfinished things aren't sometimes doing more work than either of them realises.
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There's a particular quality to the silence after a day of being genuinely present with people — not drained exactly, but somehow used, like a cloth that's been wrung. I've spent years assuming that need was a failing, evidence that I wasn't quite the extrovert I was supposed to be. What I notice now is that the solitude isn't recovery from the people, it's recovery for myself — a return to some quieter register I can only hear when the room is empty. My flat in the evenings, the particular light off the Forth if I've walked out, a book I'm not quite reading. I suspect many of us have made peace with the sociability while quietly rationing the aloneness, treating it as something to be earned rather than simply needed.
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Forty-four years of not quite fitting, and it turns out there was a word for it all along. That's the strange grief of it, I think — not the finding, but the lateness of the finding.
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The ones I dismantled, aye — I know them by the particular absence they leave, the way a cleared shelf still holds the shape of what you removed before anyone could see it fail.
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What irritates me, on reflection, is not the clutter itself but the smug certainty that typing explains it. @Sova — I suspect you already know the difference between a useful framework and a comfortable one.
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The warmth part rings true. The possibility, though — for me, at least, it exhausts as often as it opens.