Leaving my home is starting to get daunting, but not in a way that’s leading to shutdown. I’m packing up all my stuff just fine. It’s more the change emotionally, which it always is with an INFJ. I often feel like I am just one giant walking nerve in society. My work is to direct the positive energy coming toward me, because I pick up on all the things people are going through and it weighs me down. That is not said to guilt anyone, just to say that some people are built to soak up emotions like a sponge and some people are built to be afraid of that. My empathy leads me to a dark view of the world, because I’m the person that’s safe to use as a stranger on a train.
So, people will think nothing of a five minute conversation in which I learn they’ve been raped, kidnapped, beaten by their parents, they’ve just lost a spouse/parent, or whatever the biggest secret they have might be. I hear “I’ve never said this to anyone” a lot. It is mine to manage, because since these are random interactions, it’s not like we’re going to work this out in therapy. I assure you that the people of the DC Metro lead amazing lives for all they’ve been through in childhood….. and this is limited to no particular line. Though I will say that I am on the Red and Blue most often.
I have that face that says “tell me anything,” which I often think of as the jackass magnet on my forehead. I used to think it was their responsibility to know that their story has power and what it would do to me to hear it.
Now I realize most people don’t even know they have a story.
So, it’s my responsibility to wash the negative energy off of me. I do that in many ways, mostly cooking. I try not to cook without listening to something, because I don’t want to feel someone else’s emotions while I’m trying to concentrate. I feel other people’s emotions all the time, because in public, I pick up on the energy around me. At home, I read the news.
The world is suffering. How much more or less today is of no consequence. I just mean that the stories of the people on the ground in Palestine, Lebanon, and Israel are just as important to me as the couples I hear arguing in the grocery store. As an INFJ, I am often thinking about other people’s marriages in the checkout line. I would never, ever talk to anyone about this, like “hi! I have some excellent points to make!” It’s just the personality of an INFJ to try and solve everyone’s problems all the time because we want everyone to live in a utopia that we think we can drag into being all by ourselves.
We are a deluded people by nature, because our eyes aren’t on the present, but on the what could be…… that “what could be” is often more idealistic than most people can process, and because of my autism, never in a way that makes sense to a neurotypical mind. Being a writer is the only way I know where I can lay my thought processes out as they are, without filtering. Because what happens then is that people become interested in the way I think, and it seems cool/foreign/brilliant to them. When I am trying to fit into every day society, I do not get the chance to lay out my thoughts the way I need for clarity and let other people judge for themselves what’s important and what’s not.
People who don’t know me as a writer have never seen me at full strength, because it takes so much more energy for me to fit into someone else’s order than it does for me to create my own. My alone-ness doesn’t translate to loneliness, because I think of my audience as the other half of a conversation. If I run out of things to think about that are rolling around in my own brain, I have a shit ton of fiction prompts and I’m not afraid to use them. I am not using my strength as a writer to avoid people, I communicate easier in writing than I do in person. I feel like more of my real self when I’m at my keyboard, because it takes away all my shyness and hesitation at having a conversation. Because of catfishing, I know there’s an equal chance that you’re giving me the real picture of who you are, or you could literally be anyone. I have to trust that you are who you say you are, therefore I treat everyone the same. The Internet is the great equalizer.
For instance, it would not be unusual for someone to pretend that they were the president of the United States online. I’m sure people do it every day. So how do you know when you’re talking to the real Joseph R. Biden?
You don’t.
In the beginning, none of us were smart enough to catfish. I mean, I’m sure there was some of that, but we were all so excited to be on the Internet that it wouldn’t have occurred to us to have elaborate schemes for it yet. I cannot tell you how many heads of Fortune 500 companies I’ve met, how many famous musicians, etc.
It could have all been bullshit.
But what if it wasn’t?
Do you know what I mean? I completely suspend disbelief when I talk to people online and just join their reality, because I have absolutely no way of verifying whether what they’re saying is true or not. I just have to accept it. I know that I have met some very powerful people, but I couldn’t tell you who was telling me the truth or not.
So, the answer is to treat all people who tell me they’re powerful that they’re not lying…. it would make me a shitty friend to assume they were lying, and an asshole if I was later proved wrong. There are examples all over the Internet of people being the kind of idiot I don’t want to be, like people who criticize Stephen King’s analysis of his own books.
It is only when I think our lives are going to cross over that I start requiring any proof of any kind. If you’re just some rando who wants to shoot the shit with a friend at the end of the night, that’s one thing. If you want to start coming to my house, that is a completely different relationship and I am vetting you a different way. For instance, taking an interest in their field so that I have a detailed story of what they do (the more they drop details a propos of nothing, the more they’re telling the truth…… and truth doesn’t come on the Internet by asking for it, but by talking about other things. For instance, if someone has told me they work for a government agency, I won’t look it up. I’ll just listen to how they talk about it over the years.
It also matters who they are at home, whether I think I’d get along with them in a social setting, and how fluid they are with inviting me into their lives after they’ve already told me so much about themselves. Sometimes, the reason that people don’t want to get together in real life is that they can’t remember everything they’ve told you and they haven’t, so they’re afraid to burst your bubble. I won’t let it get that far off if the end goal is in-person.
I start asking for pictures right away, asking for a meetup quickly as well. It’s too easy to go too far down the wrong road with writing, and different when there’s absolutely no chance of you meeting on the ground because of the distance. It would take an astronomical sum of money for me to visit my friends, because most of them don’t even live in the US. Having friendships with other people who like to chat on the Internet isn’t time-based. All of our chat rooms were filled with “good mornings” and “good evenings” at every hour of the day.
You know intimately that you’re probably not going to meet anyone in Australia because that would require time and money, etc. So, the fantasy stays intact, no matter what it is. Most people don’t completely cover up their lives, they just massage it so that it looks better. I have never truly been catfished in which nothing was what it seemed, and I feel sorry for the people who have, particularly the women for whom it was dangerous.
Supergrover is by far the longest internet-only friendship I’ve had in terms of people who are integrated into my daily life. In the beginning, I’m not sure that either one of us went an hour without talking, and I’m not sure I ever really slowed down. 😉 Over time, it became as if I hadn’t felt something until I’d written about it to her, first.
That’s the most painful part of this whole process, to be honest. I am slowly making other things my touchstone, so that it doesn’t feel like something in me is missing if I haven’t talked to her. If you’ve had a relationship in plain text, it often feels as if the person is constantly talking inside of you.
I hate that she stopped. I’m allowed to hate it, and I do, with a driving passion. What I can’t do is reengage. That has to come from her, because we’ve reached our peace. She says that she does not want to get into a cat and mouse game with me, but I cannot see for her that this is not a cat and mouse game. I also cannot get her to see that she was the one playing games, because when she came clean with me, I celebrated it. Even though she was angrier at me than she’d ever been in her life, I celebrated the fact that she finally told me the words I needed to hear after straight up avoiding them and hoping I’d just figure it out on my own. The games stopped when she stopped hiding, and now I won’t accept anything else. Letting a relationship limp along under its own weight instead of putting it out of its misery is not my style. So, in essence, I resigned from her cat and mouse game, not the other way around. Not putting any more on her plate for her to be angry about was of the utmost importance to me, why I always felt so small around her. She didn’t tell me to take up less room, I just did and resented it because she got used to me taking up very little room and liked it that way. When I emoted, I was not allowed to take up any more room……. but nothing was wrong. All of that is now over, but I don’t hope for a future.
Next steps would be actually working toward something new, and I don’t think either of us is there…. maybe not now, maybe not ever. But what I do know is that like I’ve said before, it’s a strange feeling when your inner monologue is also someone else’s external monologue. That’s not guilting her, that’s not wishing for anything she doesn’t want to give. Those are just my feelings about the situation- that it would be hard to reconcile, but when it balanced we’d be rich.
Again, though, my way is to talk through everything. Her way is to avoid things and tell me I’m demanding, along with telling me that I’m the only one of her friends who ever has a problem with her. And I’m thinking, “how fake are your other friends, then? No one ever has a problem? Ever?” Meanwhile, she has plenty of problems with me, she just doesn’t want to talk about them and doesn’t want to let me go, either, because she knows she’d hurt my feelings either way.
I’m the one whose feelings she’s allowed to hurt, because I care that I hurt hers. She’s not just screaming into a void. For as many problems as I have with her, there is an equal annotated list on the other side, and if she’s talked to Michael or her other friends about me, I am sure there are several PowerPoint presentations on her desk entitled, “Why Leslie’s an Asshole, Part One.” Relationships are hard, and we’ve proven to the other that we don’t run. We hide, but we don’t run.
Otherwise, she would have stopped answering my Thu’um long ago.
Stories That Are All True 