Communication Epiphanies of the Last Week

June 18, 2016 by Arctic Hare! 3 Comments

So, I’m not going to post the post I was going to post.

I thought it was pretty good after I wrote it, but on 2nd thoughts. Nope.

I mean it’s not not good, but it’s not the message I want to add to the world.

Silence can be annoying. It can be perturbing, but I find it the preferable alternative.

For years, I blamed a disorder for my lack of speech, my lack of words.

My blog almost further proves it – the long gaps, and the insanely long time it takes for me to reply to comments.

Any foray into social media – tumblr, twitter, blogging – spells out the same story. I’m quiet, and take very long to reply to things addressed to me.

I didn’t know what to think – The people around me usually have a ready word, the bloggers who do share several similarities to me write back within the day.

Then I learned that it seems Fi keeps its feelings to itself and stuff started to make a little sense.

Not that that’s helpful at all. I still have at least 10 things I’m trying to write back on, and zero confidence – so I always pass it by someone else to see what they think.

That’s not normal! Or is it? I don’t know.

But it feels like society expects you to have an opinion on things, a ready reply, and if you don’t you aren’t heard. I realize the amount of cultivating which goes on in my head (not a unique attribute) is not offset by output. It all kind of stays swelled up there and in me, and makes me seem very mysterious.

But not so – just do you want to hear hours of commentary on what my international friends did and said I thought was cool? Or how the character development in this that and the other is awesome? Or how I plan to make a book into a movie? Or the intricate nuances of dog training and baking? (Oh, gosh! Not dog baking – er, just baking.)

That’s rather boring, or if it’s not, only useful to me. Its use is so limited I don’t really have anything to open up and share.

It’s not a wasteland, but the harvest is alien.

My mom avows that she doesn’t mind me prattling on about these topics, that it’s enjoyable. I believe her, but one of the things I’m always working on is “the point of things”, and I don’t know the point of sharing these things, so I try not to do it. (I’ve gotten a little better at this though – living and doing before I have explanations for everything.)

In the end, this reinforces my feeling useless. Discovering I was an INFP made me hopeful that I could be a good friend. Now I realize that my F stands for “keeps to oneself the only thing that could possibly bring people together” I’m disheartened once again. What’s the point of being a caring member of the human race if you can’t show people you care?

There seems to be no simple way to “get to know me” and there seems to be no way for me to say the thoughts in my head that might actually contribute to society. I think and I think on an issue, and then the words come. But thinking someone is the most precious thing to you since sliced bread, or that what they said really impacted you is not an issue so it’s not something that I can connect and associate and thus find words for. It’s left in pictures and feels and abstractities that have no hope of being repeated to the person and in turn buoying them.

That’s probably not all there is to it. There’s probably great things I can do. But discovering that the reason I speak so effortlessly and long on the subjects I do is directly related to the amount of connections I’ve gathered for that subject was instructive.

But it got me no further on my biggest question: How do I communicate the good things in my mind with the outside world?