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January 20, 2004

a thorny friendship

so after i got back from the license renewal adventure, and had dealt with the emails and voicemail that had come while i was gone, though not with the guilt over being away from work all afternoon and the stress of being in that place, i was attempting to clear away a mass of unneeded windows when my mouse focus was abruptly stolen by a message from my friend j.

j. who has not responded to most of the messages i've sent her in the last year. whether our friendship withered because she wanted it that way, or because of something i did, or circumstance, or what, i don't know, but we didn't really make it past the birth of her second child.

sometimes i wonder if i'm an unwanted tie to her former life as an artistic free-spirit; for a long time, she seemed to be being pulled reluctantly in the Beige World by her husband and by the realities of motherhood.

anyway, i find her strangely demanding now, and often incredibly irritating. she'll ask questions based on incorrect assumptions, which i have to correct to be able to answer the question, but because she's an INFP like me, she's very sensitive and it can be difficult to do this without hurting her a little.

she speaks in metaphor and flowery language which i have to sort through to understand what she's saying. it takes a lot of energy.

earlier this year i came up with a theory about INFP's. i think we often attach ourselves to someone with a different temperament who is our bridge to the practical world. someone who becomes part of our everyday life, who can say, "hey, we need to clean the kitchen," or, "hey, we need to buy your mom's birthday present this weekend, because we won't have time next week." by nature, we really suck at things like cleaning and planning. we're dreamers, we live in our heads a lot.

but some of us remain unattached, and we have to learn to be practical on our own in order to survive. i feel that i've become increasingly practical during my adult life; people who have known me for some years can attest to this, i think. and now that i've developed the non-dreamer parts of my personality, i find being around someone who hasn't almost unbearable.

INFP's are drawn to each other; there aren't very many of us (how many oversensitive dreamers does the world really need?), and we can sometimes give each other a level of understanding that others just can't. i miss the way j. and i used to be friends, but i just don't know what to do with her anymore. i hope i wasn't short with her when we messaged today, but i probably did manage to hurt her feelings in some way. oh well.

Posted by lisa at January 20, 2004 06:44 PM | TrackBack

Comments

if it's any consolation, i've lost touch with most of my friends who have had babies, too. their focus completely changes (duh), and they're not so much girlfriends anymore as they are commentators on motherhood (which happens to be almost completely boring to me).

i'm INCREDIBLY THANKFUL for my girlfriends who have not had children. i'm going to say that one more time: i'm INCREDIBLY THANKFUL for you, for mary, for sarah, for charo...

that all sounds painfully selfish, doesn't it? egads. it's almost as if i don't want my friends to have babies.

wait... really, now that i think about it, there's no 'almost' about it... i don't want my friends to have babies.

perhaps i should be writing all of this down in my own damn blog. ;^)

Posted by: christa on January 20, 2004 10:49 PM

To paraphrase Kermit the Frog:

Someday we'll find out,
as sensitive dreamers,
it's good to be
INFP.

Posted by: Phil on January 21, 2004 06:23 PM

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