After The Empath’s Journey came out recently, I wrote this guest post about the 3 Things I Learned as an INFP Writer Working on my First Book. I talked about how throwing our hat over the fence is good for sensitive INFPs.
I also talked about how our multiple interests don’t make us dilettantes but can help us create richer work, and what I learned about the writer’s “voice” while writing my first book.
These were, of course, just a few of the things I learned during the gestation of this creative project. But many other wonderful experiences and insights happened as well. One of the most amazing points in the journey of writing The Empath’s Journey was when my eyesight actually improved during the writing process.
Here’s what happened. The number for one of my eyes improved by a point. I also have astigmatism in one eye and the number for that dropped by half as well. For me, astigmatism shows up as a problem when I am driving at night (which I hardly ever do) and the light from oncoming cars splits into fragments and disorients me.
It was really interesting and gratifying to experience how writing a personal book, a book during which I also did a lot of journaling, cleared some gunk inside me. It was almost like it wiped away at a grimy mirror, and I could actually see the things around me clearly.
While I didn’t include everything that I journaled about in the book, simply writing those experiences down catalyzed them and changed their energy.
This was definitely one of my high points during the long process of writing this book. It showed me how powerful writing is and how amazing feeling our feelings and getting them down on paper can be.
What You Think is Wrong with You as an INFP Writer Might be the Very Thing that’s Right About You.
The other thing I learned through writing The Empath’s Journey was that whatever I thought was “wrong” with me was actually not wrong, but the very thing that made me an artist. All through my 20s, I always felt as if there lived very opposing kinds of people inside me. It’s not only that I had multiple possibilities, multiple personalities inside, it was also as if they were all completely separate and were pulling me in completely different directions.
I was so scared that this made me “crazy” or impossible to “solve.” So, for much of my 20s, I decided to fit myself inside the box of the “normal.” I did an office job in a process-oriented company where everything was very linear, very 1-2-3. It was almost like I was afraid of some part of myself that I didn’t know what to do with and my conditioning pushed down very hard against it.
But after a long struggle back to my true self, now that I have written my first book, recently, I had an insight. It was as if some new knowledge coalesced inside me. Although I have read practically all my life, all of a sudden, I had this very clear sense that writers were very similar to actors. Just like actors play multiple characters, writers, especially when they write fiction, are also playing multiple characters.
In a sense, they are these multiple characters. George R.R.Martin, for example, is, in one degree or another, both Tyrion and Arya, both Cersei and Bran.
Although The Empath’s Journey is a memoir and so non-fictional, crafting my own character to fit inside the book seemed to have brought this crystal-clear knowledge together. I mean, it was pretty simple, come to think of it.
I kind of already knew this, didn’t I?
But the connection that I hadn’t made earlier was that I was a person like this, that I was a person inside whom characters lived and possibilities rose and different motivations clashed. I was a person who could empathize with both the hero and the villain.
I was the person who could pretend to be both the hero and the villain or the heroine and the villainess, as the case may be.
I was an artist.
Artists are shape-shifters. Artists have things inside them that look almost opposing but that can be reconciled and joined together. Artists always have a certain creative tension inside them. That’s what makes new creations possible.
New things are not made by doing the same old, same old. New things are made by the push and the pull of disparate parts. When there is that spark between what looks completely unrelated, then something new is born out of the fire.
I didn’t understand this was who I was earlier in my life. An artist.
In fact, I was so convinced that something was terribly wrong with me that I kept my many-headed creativity locked tightly inside a box.
But the thing is, if you lock something so powerful, you are going to create a deep divide inside of your self. You are going to feel scared of all the possibilities you haven’t expressed because they are a kinetic energy jumping and shouting inside you.
Sometimes, we don’t recognize how creativity works. Then, these possibilities can almost feel like ticking time bombs.
But they are not.
Now, I know that. What’s inside me is a very different creature from the “normal.” I am the kind of person who naturally makes up stories. I am the kind of person who needs their imagination to live. And it’s not even as if I am making up these stories.
It’s almost as if I am a story-making thing.
When I meet people or watch a YouTube video or look at someone doing something distinctly odd, I almost instantly have a back-story about them. Some of it is real things I have picked up about them but some are just embroidered “facts.”
This very curious part of me that lives inside me needs a channel into which all its energy can flow. This person needs pen and paper on which characters can peacefully (or otherwise) live out their lives. This person needs a place for their imagination to grow into lush forests.
Is There a Question You Keep Asking Yourself Again and Again as an INFP Writer or Sensitive Creative?
Now, I know that the question you keep on asking yourself, again and again, has your answer inside it. Looking at the tick-ticking of my office clock, confused at what sort of a person I really was, more than a decade ago, I used to keep asking myself, “Am I an artist? Am I?”
I asked this to myself again and again, over years and years. How was I to know, for sure? How did anyone know?
Now, I know that if a question bothers you this much, it’s because it’s not a question. It’s a desire.
It’s an answer.
It’s something you ask tremblingly, still not sure of yourself, still not sure whether you are valid, still not sure whether it’s okay to have these deep needs.
But now, after so many years, so many twists and turns, I know.
Am I an artist. Am I?
Yes, I am.
I was one even then, all those years when I looked at my office clock, all those years when I cut little parts of myself to fit inside an industrial mold. I wouldn’t have felt that pain otherwise. I wouldn’t have felt so acutely that I was selling myself out. I had a little voice inside me even then that I tried to gag and stuff with normalcy.
But what is you, is you. It calls you. It prods you. It tells you that you won’t ever be comfortable if you don’t come back to it.
So, now, when I have finally named my identity as an artist, I have also claimed my path. I have said this is me. I have an answer.
That’s why naming ourselves is so important, I think. Names are the mirrors that show us our true face. Names tell us this is who we are, not the distorted reflection we’d seen in other people’s faces, in other people’s behaviors, but this, that if we wear them, if we simply try, they might become the key that helps us unlock our own mysteries.
Now, the questions are: Am I willing to live my answer? Am I willing to walk step-by-step with it in faith? Am I willing to search for the path forward in the darkness?
That’s finally up to me. And whatever your question is and whatever your answer is, that, as well, is finally up to you.
Ritu Kaushal is the author of the memoir The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal experiences from her own life as an emotional empath with insights from different psychological theories to give empaths more tools and resources to connect with themselves.
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