I hate to pester people and I always feel like when I request for someone's company, I am being very needy and clingy. The shitty thing is that I let myself be manipulated into feeling bad about myself. I don't even think it's a conscious manipulation, because it is inherent in that type's personality and is quite unavoidable for them. I let myself, again and again, believe in something that can never be and it makes me feel utterly foolish every single time.
It is the downfall of everything NF - the inability to detach themselves completely from emotions, the ability to be hurt way too easily by others and ultimately, the inability to move on and leave the past behind.
The intuitive ability of all NFs is supposed to help in preventing hurt, but there's either something wrong with me or with other people.
They say that INFJs are never wrong and I can account for that. In all my years of living this life, I have never had a single prediction go wrong. They are either proven right, or not proven at all. What INFJs lack is the openness and the extroversion to go out there and find out whether a prediction is correct. In fact, I find that to be intrusive. INFJs do not predict events, per se, but how people would react to events. One of the more trivial things that we never predict wrongly is who has a crush on who, however, this isn't always proven right because people naturally deceive themselves.
The most terrible thing about this ability to predict is when the prediction becomes personal, you start doubting your own intuition. You can't differentiate between your own fantasies, so loud in your head, and intuition. At the back of our INFJ minds, the answer is always there and we can hear it, but when it is inconsistent with the outer world, then the level of doubt deepens.
My intuition tells me that the feeling is mutual, but I cannot help but suspect that that's not my intuition, but my idealism. It's weird, because even when I separate myself from my emotions, the same notion is there - "The feeling is mutual." But the outer world is drastically inconsistent with the prediction and it's starting to make me feel as if I'm going mad and my intuition is becoming faulty. I've never been wrong before. People always deny my predictions, because they tend to go a little too deep for people to be comfortable with, but they are almost always proven right at the end. The few prediction that haven't been proven right are mostly my reading of people that go much deeper than they like, so much so that I don't want to question them in fear of intrusion. We'll leave that part to our extroverted counterparts.
But just because I've never been wrong before, doesn't mean I can never be wrong. I will blame that kind of doubt on Philosophy lessons taken over the 4 years of my Secondary school life. It's called inductive reasoning, I believe. The most typical example we used is the rising of the sun. For as long as humankind can remember, the sun always rises in the East and sets in the West. We then assume that the sun will always do that. But inductive reasoning can be flawed and in essence, it is just an extrapolation of data.
The graph above explains what extrapolation is. You basically take a bunch of data you have collected to predict the future. So just because the sun has risen in the East and set in the West for the past millenniums does not mean that we can assume it always does that. Bringing down to a simpler example...if you have a carton of a dozen eggs and you take out 11 eggs for testing, you cannot assume that just because 11 of those eggs are fresh that the last egg is also fresh.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that just because INFJs are never wrong with their predictions and I've never been wrong with my predictions, doesn't mean that I can never be wrong. It doesn't mean that the notion of "the feeling is mutual" is a correct prediction because it can be the one testing that proves the hypothesis wrong. This is what Hypothesis Testing in Maths meant when they said "you can only prove a null hypothesis wrong, but you cannot prove it right".
What angers me most is that I have danced this dance so many times already, in the same exact manner. Just when I suddenly think that we are ready for pleasant and constant conversations, he falls absolutely silent and it hurts my feelings. I know he doesn't intend to, but doesn't mean it hurts any less. This whole thing about intent and consequences again and since I have nothing better to do, I'll argue that out again.
I have once expressed my opinion that just because someone's intention was good does not justify the consequences. Take for example, the situation I keep reading in my Cherik fanfictions. Twice Erik has hurt Charles, once with a bullet through his spine and the other by dropping a whole stadium on him. It is canon that Erik never meant to hurt him, but it has hurt Charles all the same. Charles can forgive Erik and I believe he would, but it doesn't mean that what he did was accounted for.
Similarly, the example of my own personal experience. The act of apologising. I had once said that I don't believe in saying "sorry" for every little mistake you make because that dilutes the meaning of the word, especially since the English language has few synonyms for that expression. You could always say "I apologise sincerely", but it's too formal and once again, you say it too much and it loses its meaning.
I believe that humans are naturally very adaptive creatures, though some personality types more than others. The more we go through the same thing, the more we begin to adapt to it. The first time you fall on your right knee, it hurts like hell, because it's the first time you felt it. You keep doing it again and again and it just feels normal and it doesn't hurt as much. The first time you get scared by a particular jump-scare and you almost shit bricks, but after a feel more times, you adapt to it. Humans are naturally adaptive creatures, which is why we are able to survive for so long.
What does this mean? It means that the first time you hear an apology from someone, you would regard him as a polite and caring individual. But if he repeatedly uses the word "sorry" for every single little thing he does, the word soon loses its impact. And then when the time comes around when he really needs to apologise for something major, the word doesn't seem to cover for his mistakes anymore, because of word association.
The two opposing view of the argument revolves around whether the intention accounts for this loss of impact. The person arguing against me (it was a very, very long argument that entertained me quite a bit) told me that it doesn't matter if the impact is reduced for as long as the intention to apologise is there, the apology should be effective. I called him an idiot and expressed my belief that his assertion is inherently selfish. Let me explain that seemingly quite huge leap in logic.
Say, for example, that I had hurt someone's feelings immensely and I'm the kind of person who apologises for every little thing on the planet. She would demand a sincere apology from me, but even if I think I am giving one, no matter how I express my regrets, the effect is loss through her association of that word when it comes from me. The word "sorry" from me is linked to minor occurrences. If I were to take the stand that it doesn't matter if she accepts my apology or not as long as I know it is sincere, I would be extremely selfish.
Why would I say so? Just ask yourself some question. Do you apologise to someone to make yourself feel better? Or do you apologise to someone to express regret or repentance for something you have done to him/her?
If your answer is the former, you need to go contemplate life. Because if you are apologising to someone so that you feel less guilty, then you are already a selfish person and there's no argument about that. What is selfish about the intention argument is that even if you sincerely feel apologetic about something but cannot communicate it to the other person, then you are just alleviating your own guilt and not offering repentance to the other person. Apologies are said to apologise to another person, not to yourself.
Bringing it back to the topic. Just because he doesn't intend to hurt me with his extreme level of ignorance, does not mean that I'm not hurt. I can certainly try to understand him, but it doesn't mean I'm not hurt. I can certainly pretend there's nothing wrong, but it doesn't mean I'm not hurt.
The problem with all this is that this exact situation happened so many times already. So much so that now, I can no longer blame anything on him...not that I did before.
I mean, look at that. Whenever anything happens, the first MBTI type to go into self-bashing and feeling guilty as hell is the INFJ. Like if you think ENFJs are bad, because their guilt is bleeding through their extroversion and basically flooding everything nearby, imagine INFJs. Our guilt is hidden in our introversion and killing us from inside-out. It thus also makes more sense why the introverts are generally more likely to feel guilty than the extroverts. The extroverts just bleed their emotions everywhere and then deny it to all the intuitive types and we are just like...dude, I can see it.
If only I were an ST. I would be able to detach myself entirely from my emotions and move on. I would be able to live in the moment and forget the past. I won't even be able to see under other people's exteriors! Imagine that! Must be a great life they live.
I've come to dislike my ability to predict things. People are self-deceptive and they will deny everything if it avoids complications. I can see it so clearly yet with their self-deceptions, I often feel like I'm the only one in the world seeing things that aren't there and I keep feeling as if I'm crazy until I'm eventually proven right.
INFJs are not crazy. We are not thinking too much. If you think we are thinking too much, then you are just thinking too little. Only a fellow INFJ can understand the hurt of another INFJ, but other personality types come close. Specifically, our NF buddies - ENFJ, INFP and ENFP. But when these types are in denial, we just feel crazy. Mad. Am I seeing things? Am I going crazy? We just keep asking ourselves that until eventually...Nope. They were just denying things too much.
And...really, it doesn't help that I'm an INFJ trying to deal with the most painful to deal with types in the world when it comes to these things. They are both especially difficult to read and constantly in denial about everything. Like I think I know what they are feeling, but they don't even know it themselves and I just can't validate anything.
And then meanwhile, I'm an INFJ here like...
I really wonder, is an ENFJ's mask stronger or an INFJ's ability to read stronger? Is the ENFJ better at hiding or the INFJ better at seeking?
I just really want to slap myself. Because even with my INFJ tendencies and my ability to read people, logic should tell me that if someone wants to just deny something for the rest of eternity, then leave them to it. If they don't want you to see something, then just pretend you didn't see it, because INFJs cannot not see it, they can only pretend they didn't.
And seriously, this is hilarious. I literally saw this the day before we went through that particular poem. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe/The spikes of the crocus. - Edna St. Vincent Millay
No comments:
Post a Comment