Originally Posted by
Minde
Sherlock Holmes was an ESTj, right? Well, what better dual for the mysterious and complicated INFj than a detective? (Perhaps I flatter myself, though - maybe I am only mysterious and complicated to me?) ENFps can be pretty complicated, too.
Seriously, though, sometimes I feel I need a professional investigator to figure things out for me - not just in the outside world, but inside me, too. "What is going on?" "Why?" and sometimes even "What do I do?" Not usually in the sense of "What is right?" but... more like "How do I fix/do this?"
It's so nebulous sometimes. Don't get me wrong. I like nebulae; they can be very pretty. But it's so hard to get stuff accomplished with them. Especially when you loose things in them. It's so easy to loose track of ideas when they're not firmly pinned down...
Bouncing my thoughts off of nice listening and talking walls helps with that. Especially if those walls happen to be clear thinkers. (Yes, I know, it's a silly metaphor, but humor me.) I do have a reason for saying "wall" because if the person is too engaged in their own agenda then... well, that does nothing to clear things up.
Something that a lot of people don't seem to realize about me is that I'm pretty flexible in what I think. So, even if I say something like it's set in stone, more than likely it's not and I'm just acting like it is for the sake of seeing what happens and because I feel I need to take on some sort of position on the matter. Especially in the context of some sort of difference of opinion.
When I'm in a disagreement with someone, I tend to fail at being concrete and strictly logical. When I try to be like that, I don't always know quite what I'm doing, so I'll take what's in my mind (nebulous colors and shapes) and approximate that as closely as I can in concrete terms - or what I think are concrete, logical terms. My reasoning behind that is logic follows truth, so if I've got the truth then the logic of it should fall into place. But I've discovered the attempted translation, from nebula to pocket knife, often fails miserably. And if I've got even a small portion of the nebula out of place, like I think a star is there when it's really not, then that tends to throw the translation even more out of whack. The urgency of an argument throws off the success rate, too.
Metaphors help a lot, though, I've found - both for explaining to me and me explaining to others. Metaphors and examples.