These Aren’t My Feelings: Absorbing Emotions as an INFJ

I have noticed that sometimes when I watch movies or TV shows I get a bit more worked up than the average person (eg. I was watched an episode of The OA this morning and I got physically anxious because of the situation… my heart was racing, my hands were clammy.) Or that when my husband comes home in a melancholy mood I have to consciously choose not to automatically slip into being melancholy too, no matter how great my day was. Or that when someone cries, I often cry too.
Today after reading this blog post and thinking more about it, I realized that this is probably why I am so numb in some situations too. Because I know from experience how easily my emotions can be manipulated, there are some times and places where a wall goes up around my heart as a defense mechanism. Church, especially has been one of those places recently. For a good number of years the music and the preacher and the people around me all influenced me, subconsciously convincing me these feelings were my own. But then it the quiet moments when I was alone, when I no longer felt those same emotions, I started to wonder if they were my feelings at all. And obviously being a follower of Jesus is more than emotions… the heart AND the head are involved. So then I would press more into the beliefs and the knowledge side of things and well… growing up in an age of skepticism makes that difficult as well. So… I don’t really have a point here, just that I appreciated this blog post and a reminder that there are other people who are trying to figure out the lines between their emotions and the emotions of the people around them.

Like An Anchor

This past Friday I did something I’ve never done before and which provided my father with much amusement. I danced at someone’s funeral. More precisely, it was at a memorial service for a man I didn’t really know. I’d seen him at church services, but we never spoke. His wife was on our dance team, though, and she asked us to open the service by dancing to Bo Ruach Elohim.

At first, I didn’t really feel much about this man’s death beyond a rather abstract sense of sympathy for those who’d loved him. But as soon as I was surrounded by the grief of those who knew and loved him, I started to feel it as well. Layering on top of that were the emotions I imagined other people I cared about feeling. I won’t go into any details, but some of the things this man’s wife and daughter…

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(is it just me, or is it you too?): why I’d rather go to the opera than church

Phenomenal writer. I couldn’t agree more.

(Comments are closed here. Please visit her blog to tell her how awesome her post is!)

No Language But A Cry

Sometimes I think all living is the story of what we do with our wounds. When we ask each other, How are you? what we are really asking is, What are you doing with your wounds today? Maybe Jesus asks the same question, when it comes down to it.

The human narrative is the narrative of woundedness. How we felt the cut to be fatal; how we try to bandage it with technology and distraction, or else inflict the same injuries upon each other; how we do our best to escape it but also feel inexplicably that such woundedness is us, is us not just in our most honest but in our most beautiful, and all our attempts at sewing really just begs for surgery; how it all feels so very much like homesickness.

The Gospel narrative, as I understand it, is also the narrative of woundedness. It is the…

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Reblogged: Why our teens have lost faith in us?

This is a post that definitely deserves a read… it addresses some things about our society/education system that are extremely detrimental, and even dangerous. I read things like this and wonder how I will ever, one day, manage to be a parent. It will only be by the grace of God…

My Feelings My Freedom

Lately, I have been quite disturbed by the growing number of suicide cases among children. We read about these cases in newspapers everyday and feel upset for those few minutes but then get back to our routines. Have we ever tried to analyze the reasons for such actions?

Do we realize our responsibility as adults of this society to take steps to stop this act of weakness?

“Suicide”- the word itself creates shivers and numbness in our mind.

Then why are the teenagers of this so called sophisticated, modern, independent, solution oriented and technologically advanced society allured into it?

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My Father Walking, and Twenty-Four Other Things

a soul that speaks to mine.
i love this.

Creative Thresholds

by William Michaelian

Am I truly limited by my senses, or are they, too, imagined? Can I prove my own existence? Is such proof desirable, or even necessary? What of my childhood, and everything else I am in the habit of believing I remember? Is memory a thing of the present? Is it a story told, and then countless times retold, changing and continuing of its own volition and accord? Drawing and writing; waking and dreaming; fiction and reality; life and death — I simply feel no need to know where, or if, one ends and the other begins. Does that make me strange? And yet what is strangeness, but the very delight of a beautiful, unaccountable world, ever the more vivid once we have learned to let it go?

Going Home

By firmly gripping a pencil in grade school and beyond, I developed a callous on the middle finger…

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of freedom

crying to Jenny & Tyler this morning.  not entirely sure what it is that is hitting me so hard…maybe their raw emotion and honesty, maybe the way they harmonize in a way that really makes it seem like their souls have been joined as one, maybe their abounding love for their daughter…

specifically the album Of This I’m Sure and this song in particular:

My Dear One, find freedom / Forfeit not hope … I listened to the logic / Fixed all the problems in my head / You didn’t know who to trust then / Didn’t know who would love you in the end … I’m not giving up on you, love

I started this morning with ordering some of the chaos that continually fights to overwhelm our apartment (a.k.a. mostly hanging up the pile of clothes that always tends to accumulate)… letting the sun rise and stream into our little home…and then doing something I never do:  yoga in my living room.  Yoga itself isn’t new for me, however, doing it by myself with just a light wordless soundtrack in the background, is novel. It made me want to start every morning that way.  To be still and know. To close my eyes and feel the way my muscles are interconnected, the way they loosen as I give them time.  To actually feel some semblance of balance, in my body and limbs and breathe, but also between my mind, body, and soul.  The typical Christian “quiet time” isn’t something I have been able to do recently without falling into the pit of my mind, however this felt free, peaceful, life-giving.  I didn’t feel pressure to reach a certain goal.  I didn’t have the distraction of comparison.  I could listen to my body, calm the voices in my head, and just connect.

Then I was listening to Jenny & Tyler while working on a collage and drinking coffee…and that’s when the tears came about.  Not the usual tears of bitterness or despair or hopelessness or loneliness… but tears of… freedom.

The Egg

The Egg

freedom of thought. possibilities. exploration. conversation. empathy. people. patience. time.

who is to say that this story isn’t the reality? i have had thoughts similar to what is expressed in this story prior to reading it. i have imagined that everyone else is actually me at a different stage of life, or a different gender, or with a different upbringing. why would this be? because i am so incredibly self-centered? because it helps to increase empathy? because i actually wrote the egg story in another life? because i heard about the story before and then forgot about it, but the ideas lingered in my subconscious?

this view of the world is not necessarily what i believe to be true, but then again, what is it that i believe? do i believe anything? should i believe anything? what does it mean to have faith in someone/something? versus trusting them? versus believing in them? what is knowing? can you know something but not believe it? can you believe something and not know it? i think i can believe in something but not have faith in it… are these hierarchical? are they shades of the same color?

thoughts anyone?

iMultiverse

Written with an eloquence I could only dream of, these thoughts have surfaced in my mind many times (less virtual simulation, more puppet show/zoo) and now I have an incredibly interesting conversation to eavesdrop on.

russell & pascal

The 5th grader noticed one of his apps had auto-updated on his quantum iPhone 72, so he opened it.

He watched as multiple fluctuations began to appear and disappear randomly in all shapes and sizes — sometimes bumping into each other and merging, sometimes exploding. He zoomed into one of the isolated bubbles and saw nothing but emptiness. In another bubble he saw white hot plasma. Time sped up and he watched it cool and dissipate into nothing as the bubble disappeared. Many more bubbles began to form. One expanded and collapsed again, causing part of the bubble to grow back out the other side. Some bubbles expanded so quickly some of the simulated energy cooled to form superheated matter, which eventually cooled further and began to clump together. He zoomed into one in time to see countless clumps collapse into beautiful stars which exploded into heavy elements that coalesced…

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empathy

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge.  It requires no accountability, no understanding.  The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.  It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.”

-Bill Bullard