NF

Jung came up with a typology for describing how we function at any given time. You are probably familiar with the Myers-Briggs spin-off of his typology. Nowadays, people tend to think of this typology as a way of labelling people and their personality types. Jung did not see this framework as fixed but as fluid.

You can take a self-test here.

I may function as an extrovert in the office but more as an introvert after 5:00. I am sure I was INFP as a child, but now I am INFJ, the J having emerged as a coping mechanism. It’s my OCD. My need to organize and put everything in order, order, order comes from fear of what might happen if I let go and just function the way I used to function as a child. Very P. I was the quintessential lost daydreamer. The other kids heard the bell signaling the end of recess. I was at times so lost in thought that I did not hear it. I would look around me and suddenly notice the empty playground, then go into a panic as I raced to my classroom. My face turned beet red as I excused myself and slipped into my little desk to pick up on the lesson in progress.

There were other events in my childhood that left me with a need to feel in control.  Your type can shift more than once in your lifetime. It can shift as you move through different contexts and environments.  It can shift through the day.  But at any given time, you are functioning in one mode or another.  Whichever function is active in your conscious self, its opposite is alive and well in your Shadow.

In any case, I have noticed something. A lot of bloggers identify themselves as intuitive feelers. It makes sense, really. NFs are the writers, dramatists and artists of the world. While other types are out living life, we feel a burning need to interpret life. We are forever searching for the meaning behind it all.

This all came to mind as I was reading Yann Martel’s novel Self. Now there is a narrator cursed with the need to figure it all out. He calls it the existential monkey on his back.

I remember when I was about 8 or 9 sitting in the bathtub, which I did most mornings before school. My hair was so oily that washing it the night before a schoolday wasn’t enough. I had to wash it every single morning or it was stringy and gross. My mother had left the bathroom, leaving behind a choking, nose-stinging cloud of Aquanet. I was looking down at my legs and thinking that one day fifty or sixty or seventy years hence, I would be in a bathtub just like this one, looking down on the same legs with the same eyes. I mean if God allowed me to live that long, I would. And because it WOULD one day happen, didn’t that mean that in some sense, it already had happened? Was time really linear?

Everywhere I went, if there was time for my mind to settle, it always settled on the meaning of life. Why am I here? What am I supposed to do with my life? What does God want from me? Does it really matter if I live or die? Do I matter? What if I kill someone? Does that really matter? I’d go to prison and someone would be dead. But does it matter?

These questions came to me in every bathroom stall, every night before drifting off to sleep, every morning before the fog of dreamland lifted.

I don’t know which was the bigger shock: finding out there were others who are plagued day in and day out by the same existential monkey, or discovering there are people who are NOT haunted day and night by these burning questions.

There are times when I would like to be one of those other people…for just one day.