And then We Were Alive

The Tragedy of INFP

The tragedy of INFP is that we live in a world that is immaculately breathtaking, beautiful, meaningful, where hearts connect and every human being is in love with the perfection of every other human being in their world.  We live in a world of sunrises and sunsets, of dawn and twilight and in the brilliance of stars in the darkest night sky and in the wholesome eternity of the variegated gray sky on the coolest of cloudy days.  We live in the spirals of fire-red leaves as the wind whips them off the skeletal branches of trees, in the feel of the air rushing around your face.  In our wildest, most beautiful imagination, the one we spend all our lives in, this is our world.  

And then we are called back.  By the cruelest clock to classrooms of dusty cinderblock and grey-haired teachers lecturing us about internal assessments and Hamlet, to the hallways full of these faces you recognize so well but know nothing about, and the whole world seems false, fake, plastic, made up.  Reality could not be so cruel, and these people cannot all just live every day in and out like this, listening (or not) to teachers and laughing about nothing at all with friends and wearing makeup and “statement” necklaces and doing homework so dutifully and coming back and worrying about college.  Where’s the air, the space, the spirals of color, the love, the wonder, the sky?  

And that’s when you start to believe this world must be just a production of your consciousness, some faulty creation of some discarded corner of your imagination, because “Reality” cannot possibly be as empty as it seems.

That’s why we have these mood swings, between eternal wonder and cynical despair at the flat two-dimensionality of everything here.  

Just if you’re wondering, non-INFPs.  That’s what’s wrong with us.  That’s why we never seem quite entirely there.  Because we’re always wondering what happened in the gap between the idealism and Reality.

(or maybe that’s just me.  sorry, if I’m wrong and it is.)