Stepping off the Merry-Go-Round

For awhile there, I guess I thought, “if it needs to be said, then I need to say it”. But the time has to be right. I’ll know because it will come spilling out. Or maybe it’s the place—from a distance, like on paper or in the world we’ve come to know, online. I know that I am an introvert. I would know this without having taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) because, well, I know how I feel about things, and I know how things make me feel. I’ve just read that INfJs are the rarest MBTI personality type, making up only 1% to 3% of the U.S. population.

We are compassionate, relying on our strong sense of intuition and emotional understanding. We can be soft-spoken, but this does not mean that we are pushovers. We have deeply held beliefs and an ability to act decisively to get what we want. How many times have I heard, “Harold, why don’t you tell us what you really think.” Chuckle chuckle. Sometimes strong opinions just have to be given voice.

We can form strong, meaningful connections with other people. While we enjoy helping others, we always need time and space to recharge. Unlike extroverts who are energized by situations that require lots of interaction with others, introverts are depleted by these interactions. Typically for me, I just want to get home, close the door and be alone with my thoughts, and do only what I want to to do, which may be absolutely nothing. I had a house guest over the summer—a friend of almost 50 years—who visited three different times in the course of three weeks, a couple of days at a time. At the end of this visit, I was “worn to a nub,” as the expression goes, and resentful. Some part of me—an important part—still hasn’t recovered from these visits.

We are idealists, and we use our abilities to translate this idealism into action. I have to add here that while I haven’t slipped into the world of cynicism, I find it harder and harder to keep my head above water in the seas of meanness and dysfunction that have come to characterize our time. Even though I subscribe online to some of the best sources of writing and news reporting—New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic—I struggle to find things that I want to read.

We like to exert control of situations by planning, organizing, and making and acting upon decisions. And I’ll add that as leaders we encourage those who support the work we do to step up, voice their ideas, and take their own leadership roles. And to get credit for what they do.When making decisions, INFJs place a greater emphasis on their emotions rather than objective facts. And while we don’t see the world through rose-colored glasses, we understand that our world is filled with both good and bad, we hope to make it a better place. To borrow a well-used expression, we seek to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Push come to shove, when our resources feel depleted, we have to step off the merry-go-round. Over the years I have found this to be true more and more frequently. An article of the December 2017 issue of Smithsonian Magazine explores the famously misquoted words of Greta Garbo regarding alone time. “I never said, ‘I want to be alone,’” she explained, according to a 1955 piece in LIFE magazine. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone! There is all the difference.”