This essay first appeared on the INFJ Blog. For more information and posts about INFJs, check out the INFJ Blog homepage.
During my interview for a recent episode of The INFJ Personality Show (episode #47), the host mentioned INFJs’ aptitude for sensing other people’s feelings—sometimes at the expense of sensing their own. I bristled at what felt like criticism (an INFJ sensitive spot). I liked to think of myself as more self-aware than someone who doesn’t know how she feels. Then I flashed on a memory that caused me to rethink that assessment.
Though I considered every moment of the 15 years since my dad’s quadruple bypass surgery a bonus, his death on July 29, 2013, still came as a shock. He had mowed the lawn and joked with the neighbors, showing no signs of the brain aneurism that would erupt overnight.
My dad’s death marked my first unexpected loss of a close family member or friend, so I had little experience with grief. I felt sad, but I functioned as well as—or in some cases better than—normal. It didn’t make sense. His absence left a huge hole in my life, but instead of crying, I found myself observing my thoughts at a curious remove, like an explorer studying an unfamiliar species. How odd that my brain thinks “I have to remember to tell Dad that next time I see him” before it remembers he’s gone. It’s weird that I’m unflappable at Dad’s wake, thanking everyone who came as if hosting high tea at Buckingham Palace. I’ve felt overwhelmed by less socializing under ordinary conditions. It’s strange that I’ve only cried once and very briefly. What’s wrong with me?
I thought of Dad often during the weeks that followed, but always with fondness rather than sadness. That changed in a single evening.
A month after Dad’s funeral, I brought the tuxedo kitten I was fostering for a local animal shelter to the basement and prepared to tuck her in. She didn’t know her limits. I closed her in one room overnight to keep her from running herself (and me) to exhaustion. She liked the routine. I was pleasantly surprised to find that once I pulled the door shut, she settled into a blanket-filled box and slept until morning without making a peep.
I decided to spend extra time cuddling Puffball since I’d return to teaching for the start of a new school year the following morning. Though I liked my work, no job could compare to summer’s blissful freedom, so each fall struck me as a small loss.
As Puffball climbed my body like a jungle gum and batted my hair like a boxer’s speedbag, I glanced at the clock and was hit by a wave of sorrow so powerful it sucked the breath from my lungs. Just like that, Dad’s absence became real and permanent. I slid to the floor, bent at the waist, and sobbed.
I realized that to enjoy summer, I had stashed unpleasant feelings about the coming school year and winter weather in a mental lockbox labeled “Do not open until school starts.” Losing Dad definitely qualified as stressful and unpleasant, so, like the clean dog leashes I pulled from the animal shelter’s dryer, my reactions to Dad’s death got tangled with worries about course enrollment, teaching observations, and stacks of essays waiting to be graded. It had all ended up in the lockbox. When the clock struck midnight on School Year Eve, the lockbox sprang open and spewed its contents.
Crying helped. Once finished, I felt like something that had caught on my ribs and tightened for a month let go. I played with Puffball while my tears dried. When it became clear both she and I needed sleep, I turned off the light, closed the door, and went to bed.
In the wake of that lesson on my capacity for denial, I have worked on keeping in better touch with my emotions. If I find myself restless or flailing, I ask, “What is it I’m feeling?” or “What could I be trying to avoid?” Spending time at the animal shelter and with my two cats as well as riding horses helps, too. It grounds me in my body, gets me out of my head, which has become too adept at self-denial. They are perpetually in the present and transparent about every feeling. The closer I come to showing them the same courtesy, the better they respond.
I hope Dad, who was always my opposite—an extrovert to whom no one was a stranger, who, I see with hindsight, often knew what I felt well before I did—would be proud of my newfound efforts at self-awareness.