One Person's Yawn Is Another's Excited Squeal

INFJ and INFP Empathy by Scott Morgan

Here is something extremely boring that I find extremely interesting.

This past year, I've become really interested in a famous personality assessment called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This assessment decides whether a person tends toward: 

extraversion or introversion (E or I),

sensing or intuition (S or N),

thinking or feeling (T or F),

and judging or perceiving (J or P).

I, for example, tend toward introversion (I), intuition (N), feeling (F), and perceiving (P), so my Myers-Briggs type is designated by those letters: I am an INFP. For the mathematically disinclined among us, I'll just tell you right now that there are sixteen different possible combinations of these letters, and, consequently, sixteen different possible personality types, according to this system.

Now, to a lot of people, this may already sound hopelessly boring. If you're one of those people, you may not want to hang around my brain on a quiet Friday evening when I am lying facedown on my bed, chin in hands, lost in a world of super theoretical Myers-Briggs madness. Sorry, general populace, but for some reason, I cannot join you in your (perfectly understandable) boredom with this topic. I am low-key obsessed with it. I can literally think about it for hours on end and never grow weary of it. There are so many interesting applications of this theory, especially if you take the time to travel deep into its labyrinthine underbelly - which I have. I can tell you right now that there is a lot more to it than those four pairs of letters. It gets infinitely complicated... and, for me, infinitely fascinating.

Just as an example of the extent of my insanity: here is an incredibly dull video that I find incredibly anything but dull, on the topic of the types of empathy employed by two of the sixteen Myers-Briggs types: the INFJ and the INFP. I love this video, which is funny, because all that happens is a man with a rather monotonous voice sits in front of the camera and talks a bunch of uninteresting rubbish. But I am not kidding you - I get excited about this. Why? Because the gentleman describes me in this video. To a T. When he talks about the type of empathy employed by the INFP personality type, he is speaking the language of my soul, and it excites me. 

And I squeal. Excitedly. Over the most boring video on earth. But maybe you have some "boring" interests as well, things that excite you that would have someone else snoring within seconds. Which just goes to show you. [The title of this post.]

Music for the Triduum

 Miserere by Gregorio Allegri and Vladimir Ivanoff

The Triduum is what we call the three days before Easter Sunday: Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. In traditional Christianity, these three days are meant to be a time of quiet reflection on the meaning of Easter, and are often marked by special church services commemorating the events of the last few days of the life of Jesus.

For me, the Triduum is very special. I always appreciate its dark, meditative mood, and the chance to focus on the sacrificial love of Jesus. To help me get in the right mindset, I like to listen to this album of sacred choral music by Gregorio Allegri and Vladimir Ivanoff. I find that the ethereal harmonies evoke the deep sense of mystery that pervades this season of the church calendar.

May this Easter weekend bring peace, joy, and hope to our hearts.

Secret Rooms

I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public;

they forget that invisibility is a super power.

- Banksy

One of my all-time favorite books is The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which tells the true story of Jews going into hiding from the Nazis in 1940s Amsterdam - all from the perspective of a highly normal teenage girl. I've read Anne's diary over and over. For some reason, I am obsessed with it. In fact, I am also in the process of collecting any and all related books and films about Anne's life.

When people ask me what I like about The Diary of a Young Girl, I tend to list Anne's personality first. Yes, she is one of those famous people, like Michael Jackson, who took a step toward me out of the annals of time and now feels like a friend. Secondly, I'll explain that I find myself attracted to the idea of ordinary people living under extraordinary circumstances. Stories like Anne's offer some semblance of an answer to the question, "What would I do if I had to face the unthinkable?"

Not much lower on the list of my personal pros for this book, though, is quite simply this: I love secret rooms. Anne herself, perhaps more than anyone else in the group in hiding, caught a glimpse of the mystery and magic of living in a secret annex. She was still young and romantic enough to see the fun in it, at least in the beginning, when the experience of going into hiding still seemed like a novel adventure.

Those rooms in the back of that Amsterdam office building, hidden behind a swinging bookcase, will forever hold a special place in the hearts of millions who cherish Anne's story. In my case, they also speak to a lifelong fascination with secret rooms. As a child I had recurring dreams about discovering secret rooms in the houses of family and friends. I'd open a special door and there it was, an ordinary space, full of ordinary things, and yet it was special because it was hidden. You could feel the mystery in the air.

Jews in 1940s Europe were hiding from a predator that sought nothing less than their lives. For them, hiding was about literal physical survival. But there are other reasons to hide, too. There are noble and beautiful reasons to want to go where no one can see you, to be hidden, to be alone. And there are other kinds of survival to be concerned about as well.

To me, it has always been important to keep some things in life a secret. There are parts of my heart that can be damaged by too much exposure to the outside world. Of course, openness and honesty are important, but there are times when flinging wide the doors to my soul is actually the opposite of honesty, because I have failed to be honest with myself. I know which things are too sacred, too painful, too beautiful to be shared. For a while, at least, they need to stay inside the secret rooms of my psyche, safe from the ceaseless pressure of being viewed and reviewed, judged and evaluated. Sometimes I find that I need to go into hiding, to be nourished and protected in the shadows of obscurity, that special space that only God and I can see. 

Things That Make Me Cry

The body of a seagull, wing splayed across the yellow line, blood splattered in its wake.
I tap the brakes, swerve around the carcass, and remember what seagulls look like when they walk, scuttling across parking lots for French fries. And I cry.

A crumpled scrap of paper I find on the library floor, scribbled with pencil: "I love you :) you can borrow my headphones and watch Netflix if you want."
I smile and think about people loving each other, in their imperfect, quirky little ways, and how they really do want to make each other happy, but sometimes they can't. And I cry.

A courtyard in the middle of a nursing home, a square plot of grass and cement, flanked by walls and windows and dying men watching game shows on television.
I discover the door and stare out at the sky, high heaven swirling in ice blue splendor, the almost imperceptible drift of the sun. And I cry.

Time passes. I see friends beside me, hear them laughing, hear myself laughing with them, and yet I know about calendars and clocks, and roads leading nowhere, and I know about space between, and cities fading in and out of focus along the freeway. And I know about cards in the mail, Christmas and birthdays and all that, fewer every year, and I know about ceremonies and certificates and everything that comes with it.

I know. Everyone knows. And most people laugh and turn up the radio. But I cry.

Teenage Dreams

I'm starting to get old, I think to myself, sitting at one of the tall tables by the window. Below me dwell the teenagers, my size yet somehow so much smaller. I can see their little limbs growing out of their little outfits - such nice little outfits, some of them, and some of the girls are wearing eyeliner now, and it looks nice too, they applied it so well, with the little wings on the sides...

I spy a couple, a girl curled up in the arms of a boy, and I wonder: thirteen? fourteen? Their faces are small; their eyes, eyelids, noses, nostrils, lips, lip piercings, all small. I think back to fourteen: the years whirl by like a merry-go-round. Children, I think; just children, just kids. Kids holding hands on the couch, thumbs stroking idly. I sincerely hope it lasts, kids, I say to myself, and even as the words enter my mind, I imagine how it will end.

Everybody's Against Me! (And I'm Loving It, But... Shhh)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, just pretend you don’t love being the social outcast, the one everyone’s trying to martyr. I know better. I know because I do the same thing.

I look around at the world and I oversimplify what I see. If I sense any resistance to what I’m doing in life, any opposition at all to who I’m trying to be and what I want to achieve, then you know what comes next. I make a drama out of this. I assign teams and put the majority of society on the side of the opposition. And then I stand on my little mole hill and scream across the valley at the mountains I’ve just made. You all hate me, but I will rise up and defeat you!

It’s so unfair, I cry. Look at the numbers. You’re so big. I’m so small. You’re such a bully, I whimper self-righteously, wiping my tears. But no matter. In the end, I will win, because I’m right.

Just try to convince me you’re not having fun out there. No, you feel strangely empowered when the world is against you, don’t you? But you’re wrong. In reality, there is no such thing as The World. There’s just a bunch of little groups of people like you and me, huddled together for shelter from Everybody Else, convinced that the world is against them. Well, I hate to be a killjoy, baby, but it’s not that simple.

Did You Ever Stop To Notice?

Earth Song by Michael Jackson

Some people speak to me. Out of the masses, out of the ages, certain souls take a step toward me and gaze into my soul, and suddenly I realize I recognize them, I know them. I don't choose these people. They just come to me, and once they do, there is no looking back.

Michael Jackson is one of these people for me. And now for the laundry list of disclaimers: I know he was weird, I know about the plastic surgery, I know about the allegations, I know his career peaked in the mid-1980s and never really returned, I know, I know, I know. I'm fully aware that he led a strange life, a broken life, but none of this changes the fact that when I encountered him on the path of my life, I froze in my tracks and stared, because I knew him. I just did. When I watch his interviews, read his writings, listen to his music, his voice slips in among my heart strings and tangles them, tugging gently. I understand Michael Jackson.

One of the things I understand most is his ability to feel the pain of the world. If you have open eyes, and an open heart, the sad truth is, you are destined to know pain. If you ever stop to notice, you will see that the universe itself is broken. Some nights it just swoops down on me and holds me, this raw, empathic awareness. I can feel it, the crying, the screaming, the trees falling, the guns firing. The world is so beautiful, but so broken. And I just want the beauty to return. I just want everything to be whole again.

This song, and the music video, speak to this desire. I honestly can't hear the chorus without getting chills. I used to walk around my land, on windy days when the clouds were racing across heaven in the high golden light, and let this music reverberate through my headphones, filling my consciousness.
 

This song explores painful territory, to be sure, but in the end, it is a song of hope. I believe, as Michael did, in the ultimate triumph of good over evil. I do believe that healing and restoration will come. I believe it will sweep the globe like a lightning storm, and the healing rain will fail, and the dreams we've abandoned since childhood will come shuddering out of the depths of the earth and splash over us like floodwaters.

To someone I love

I see worlds in you. Dark landscapes shifting, evolving over aeons. Vast wastelands of unexplored terrain.

I see it. The night sky above you, the labyrinth of paths to nowhere. The loneliness, the inner scream.

I see. Silver songs of wolves, swimming upward through the dark. Galaxies piercing the soft muted blackness, swirling, ice.

Inexpressible

Evening Falls by Enya

Floating around the internet is a list of cryptic-looking words, meant to describe indescribable feelings. I've seen it several times now, in several variations, and yet whenever I come across it, I always click, coming in for a closer look, hoping to find what I am searching for.

There is so much inside me that I cannot express. I am haunted by surreal emotions that come over me out of nowhere. I ache to express what I feel, but there are some experiences that not even the most colorful, obscure foreign word can capture. These feelings must be felt to be understood; and even then, you will not understand them, although you will yearn to, craning your neck to see over the horizon of your soul.

I Don't Want to Hurt You

I literally hate hurting other people.

Yes, we may disagree on many things. Yes, our personalities, values, and interests may clash. Yes, I may wish you would stop doing what you are doing, wish you would go away, wish you would leave me alone.

But I do not want to hurt you.

I go to lengths. Great lengths. To avoid hurting other people. Sometimes unhealthy lengths. I tell white lies. I dodge confrontation. I skirt around the point. All because I do not want to do it. I don't want to risk driving a lance through another heart. I can't stand it. I hate it.

And you know why, because it hurts me. Any kind of conflict, even the most trivial, hurts. It's almost a literal physical pain. It feels like toxins are injected into my system. My blood starts buzzing and burning and I want to scream. I don't know why this happens to me, but maybe I am ultimately selfish for avoiding conflict, because I know full well, it hurts me as much as anyone else when I enter the fray and lash out against someone.

I have convictions and beliefs and values and I know them well, I know myself. But I don't want to impose myself on others. I live in constant consciousness of the very different experiences others may have had with the selfsame things that I love and cherish. Sometimes I am afraid to open my mouth, because I know I always run the risk of releasing pain into someone else's heart. I don't want to do that. I know what pain feels like.

I don't want to hurt you, but there is always a margin of error, isn't there? Nobody's perfect, and circumstances arise by accident, flinging accidental hurts into surrounding minds unintended. But my goal is to never inflict grief on purpose. There is too much agony in the world as it stands.

Through me flows the eternal light...

With my hands on the shoulders of the universe, I inhale God and exhale dawn.

Eternal love bleeds through my fingers, flooding the chambers of reality's soul.

This is my destiny, dealing in love.

Love is the source of my being and the essence of my sojourn.

I speak one healing word into the sunken, shattered chasms and a million voices echo back to me...
voices of dreams devoured before daylight.

I sing patiently until the voices remember the Song.