my biggest flaw is simply being oblivious to the social story.
my constitution is deeply habituated within me, often stubbornly so, and this obliviousness is the result of a lack of development in other ways. i will at times resist simply owning the fault, but only in the sense that i resist others utilizing pejorative judgments that themselves are constituted within another set of conditions that is not the same and is not superior simply because it is connected to more powerful ways of playing within a particular social space. so instead i often try to find a common denominator, through abstraction, to re-orient the scales. to find an equilibrium for shared learning to best result. i don't think it's fair to watch them tip in service of a direction of change as much as being part of a larger, more reflexive process of feedback. a completed circle. an ability to recognize how the spaces themselves constitute the patterns of conditions from which we can make judgments at all. the spaces that typological thinking demarcate (even tho most of us use it to try to change other types and demand apologies for how we've been treated in the past by those "types" that we deem based on the political boundaries that emerge in our negotiations of what types are and in our own anonymous sourcing of "facts").
at the same time, my social development, as an inferior so type, hinders me. in contrast to updating the story of others, i think in terms of me too much. in terms of sx self-aggrandizement. meanwhile, as an e5, an e8 shadow, a willful body determined to know its own power lies beneath my habitual awareness. i either completely resist the use of power, which takes me beyond the edge of what i can realistically be (setting up those j predictions, those shoulds, in ways that are too disconnected from reality to be fair to me which would allow me to be fair to the world, to be integrated as an interior and as an exterior at the same time), which undermines my foundation and self-efficacy, and leaves me needy and more manipulative as a result. contradictions are everywhere, but the Fe guess system is what it is. we still live towards something at all times. to try to balance the idea-ness of this towards with the moment is the challenge.
i think the most annoying thing about infjs in general is their goddamned preciousness. the desire to never have waves. avoid conflict at all costs. comparing everything to an ideal of what is beautiful. at times refusing to fight for anything because they identify with their ideals too much, which are simply their ideas of themselves. an unwillingness to let go of their desire for harmony with their values (/motives) when deeper issues and higher priorities sometimes need to take the forefront. both internally and externally, and to know the difference between the two. otherwise, there's too much self-referentiality (tangled chains of meaning with no beginning and no end) to move forward, open up to uncertainty, learn from experience, and be wrong (in the composite eyes of the aggregation of all the eyes through which they can see). it prevents them from, at the same time, learning to use their own, and from staying with themselves enough to recognize the inherent conflicts that can be reconciled not simply from a higher order of meaning but from the creative fluctuations that emerge as a result of this instability. and that exists within us just as much as it exists outside of us, a fact that prevents us from losing awareness of what it's like to be fully immersed in experience and instead requires us to notice changes and stay in the flow of time, because it too has much to teach us. and because it is a central way in which we can know and be with others, and ourselves.
giving us shit about this distance from the moment, however, is also unfair. this is like criticizing an infp for inferior Te. it's easy for it to just feel like impatience and a lack of acceptance, because it expects too much too soon. we still try to be present in the ways that we can be. we are still trying to influence in the ways that seem right to us. we are still committing to what we think is important. we are still really good at listening in some highly unusual ways that can help people with meaning traps. and it's true, much can get lost in the translation between the infp and the infj way, but this loss happens in both directions. im my own life, i have so much experience making sense of moments in which we've both misheard each other. to feel like you are treated as if you are not even trying is frustrating because we are thinking about the gap all the damn time. and it is the joke orangeappled says. we are trying to be too perfect, so that we miss the point because we overcommit to solving the problem in one way that is bound to fail. for us, we inherently focus on the problem of bridging the gap and creating common denominators. to find quasi-stable methods for comparison (to help us all see ourselves in a shared context) and to establish a communication network that can thrive. for me this results in a self constituted to give up itself to bridge the gap, motivated by the self-aggrandizing desire to be the best bridge and bind the best self, losing itself in the process of not having a self to give because it is solely fixated on the motive of being the giver (also e4 --> e2 tension). it sounds silly, circular, and paradoxical, but this is true of any "type," any "cognitive function" seen in isolation. no function is sufficient to represent the whole of the socio-cognitive reality that we are part of. we feel this and try to live up to this understanding, which often results in high expectations of consideration from others. Te lives in a land of black and white.
and with infps, the most dangerous pattern is feeling condemned unfairly by another while at the same time feeling superior. this often results in the transliteration of thinking styles. because both types, and especially e4s, recognize the contradictions in any claim to superior value. infjs too recognize that our ideals and values are always constructs that we use to mediate our boundaries and patterns of connection, but what we focus on is an attention to how those must be negotiated across a great variety of orders. we think in terms of orders. my assumption, and maybe this speaks to infj assumptions in general, is that everything has function. our ability to recognize this is a necessity to live in the relativity that we are tossed into. it is a way of comparing value for orders of things rather than simply at an embodied, subjective level, an experiential level. it is a way of acceptance and faith-building and not simply avoidance. it is not simply blind purpose but a central aspect of the evolutionary process. it helps us organize our guesses, rather than thinking that ex post facto "reasons" are enough, or that time can be slowed down to allow reason to be the sole guiding light, or to bask in the false sense that experience can exist without meaning (which is itself the process of constellating across orders).
also, it's really frustrating feeling like your ability to describe your experience is immediately written off as a way of manipulation and shirking the responsibility to change by others who rely on the power of social expectation, of j, even when they pretend like what they are fighting is the j world. because we all use social expectation when we make a case for anything. it is part of all of us, part of what binds us together not just socially but individually. we all use meanings that have various weights without seeing why those meanings are weighted the way they are. we have to. they organize us. they are efficiency. they are the structure of intelligence that provides the context for experience. the conditions of communicating across domains of experience. we cannot unpack the world at all times. as an inj, and probably an awkward e5, it's especially frustrating when those others are playing the "common sense" game in ways that seem deliberately ignorant in order to utilize social resources unreflexively (/without responsibility). when your describe yourself, what you are at your core not simply to issue a claim to RIGHTS but to offer an account of a kind of experience, reflexive in the ways you can be, a kind of humanity that deserves respect and a sincere attempt to relate to it and meet it halfway as well. even as we at times need pushing because we get stuck in too many orders and forget what it's like to be a person who shits, whose stomach growls, and who must politic with their own desires just like everyone else. the whole being above this thing is a categorical error that plagues us, but the underlying why is not bad, and it constitutes a path that we must take in our own individuation.
finally, the T act of visualization is absolutely necessary to help us cut through our ideas and see the outcomes in a more precise way. without it, we are somewhat helpless, and this feeling of helplessness does produce a great deal of existential and social anxiety. visualization, or perhaps simulation more broadly, helps us ground ourselves in ways that can be measured for likelihood. it brings us closer to the kind of learning that produces subjective, experiential ethics, the ability to relate to others' stories of what has happened by thinking about the outside world, by the descriptions of the event that you can manage when you experience it as a kind of simulated process. without these movies, we have no flow, and cannot merge and diverge fluidly from the worlds of others.