I apologize for the forthcoming
massive wall of text. But…
Oh, my! After a marathon thread read, the similarities are so uncanny! Even the specific ones.
Speaking of which, and this may be one far too specific and personal to be something common among INFJs, but I need to know. When I was perhaps 3 or so, I came to believe that I had latent "magical powers." I
truly thought that I was going to fully come into them on my 12th birthday. I was so impatient, that each Christmas up to my 6th, I'd ask the mall Santa Claus if he would please convince God to allow me to receive all my magic powers early. I got a lot of these:
I thought that I came from a different universe and was sent here to do something widely influential and special. Maybe I was just a really deluded, egocentric kid, or maybe everyone--regardless of type--thinks something like this to some degree, but here's the thing: I still have to beat this belief over the head with a Logic Stick; it's still there, albeit, assuming varying incarnations as I grow older.
I used to think I could read people's minds and communicate with trees. I spent hours in my front yard singing songs for them as well. I thought that when the wind'd blow through their branches, they were applauding my performance. I referred to the Dogwood tree in my front yard as my best friend. To this day, I've never cried so much and for so long as when my parents had to cut it down to make room for an addition to the house. I still feel I have a very strange connection with nature, particularly trees.
I'd always know what we were going to have for dinner that night. For example; "spaghetti" would randomly pop into my head while on my walk home from school. Also, I knew my mother was pregnant with my brother before she told anyone, and before any signs of it were evident. I distinctly remember being 5 years old, clutching her abdomen and exclaiming,"Hi! I can't wait to see you!" and her with a
I also believed I communicated with dead people, even though I did not believe in an afterlife. As I've become older, I've tried to find ways to discredit these and other similar things. "Maybe I was told and didn't remember?" "Maybe I saw spaghetti sauce on the counter, made the connection unconsciously, and forget about it?" But I've never been able to come up with any definitive answers, and don't foresee that ever happening. Memories and interpretations of them become warped and dog-eared from handling and re-handling, consequently, diminishing clarity and confidence in truth of them as the years pass, regardless of strength of conviction in present rightness (which, admittedly, is probably a bit warped as well...)
As if I haven’t written too much already...
Do any of you all have a serious issue with reality? It’s not that I don’t understand how unrealistic and crazy these things sound, and in which specific ways they’re illogical, but for some reason, acknowledgment isn’t enough to completely eradicate the belief from my subconscious and translate the recognition of absurdity into the full, assimilated adoption of wholly and explicitly logical “beliefs.†(Yes, logic negates the need for the “belief,†but I hope you know what I mean…) It bleeds discreetly and unwittingly into everything about me, and only in retrospect, analyzing how I’m thinking and why, am I able to realize it for what it is. It’s...just..so..FRUSTRATING! :steam:
I feel like I’m a bunch of complete, and completely different personalities in one person and there’s no basis from which to assert, “this one is me, and that one isn’t because of X, Y, Z.†There’s no reason to value or pick one over any of the others.
Anyone...?
Edit: This is probably wrong. The first examples were all during childhood. Any really introverted kid with an active imagination could probably share some of those, or something similar. I think they are too specific, looking at it now. Hmm. I won't delete it. Ya know, in case someone feels the need to blackmail me later or something.