Is Fe actually just emotions?

Once I finally figured out ages ago what I think is Fe about me, I thought at my worst or most out of control I had been over-the-top emotional, almost untamably, and I’d had to work really hard to get a grip on my emotionality. The easiest conduits for it were performing arts, because then the emotion had a place to go, to be relevant, and Fe is great for filling up a space with energy and reading an audience. But once any given performance was over, the temporary holder for the emotion was gone.

I think that Fe at its best is that lock on the receivers of the message. So over time I have tried to put more of my energy behind that. The biggest early help to me in that regard was studying rhetoric with a professor who was an awesome, intense LSI and who’d created a highly structured, detailed system for teaching persuasive communication. He actually measured his grading to the half point, giving quantified feedback on every aspect of students’ work, even though the work was qualitative. So I never had any lingering questions about where I needed to learn to calibrate.

My experience of Fe is that it is not very particular or specific about what it attaches to. It is really broad and though it molds exactly to what it encounters, it is undiscriminating about what it will encounter in the first place. So ... it it is hard to withdraw my attention from anything around me. I can’t always figure out what among all the stuff I’m reading / locking into is salient. Everything in the world looks interesting.

It seems like Ti (at least LSI-style) is often good at creating structures that limit my attention and focus it (and that Se is good at going for “the shiny thing,” rather than “everything,” which is probably another way of directing attention).

Or ... all of this is just my brain not working right. Yay.