On being an intensely feeling, but private person.   

I am a deeply feeling person. But I don’t wear my feelings on my sleeve. 

In fact, I think many people who know me casually may not even think of me as emotional. It’s almost like I have an exterior of calmness. And that’s all they can see. 

Inside, the weather could be anything. 

My emotional waters may actually be calm. Or there may be storms swirling inside. 

Depending on the person & the situation, I also come across very differently. Sometimes, I come across as warm and open. And sometimes, I come across as distant and reserved. 

I have talked about this before with this different metaphor too (which others also use): It’s as if, as an INFP personality type (an introverted type whose feelings are hidden inside), my feelings are an iceberg, and only the tip of this iceberg can be seen from the outside.   

Even in writing, although I write from a deeply personal place, I am also a very private person.    

This paradoxical sense of being a person who is deeply emotional, who wants to be understood in a deeper way, and yet, also wants to keep their feelings private keeps coming up for me. I had this experience again in some conversations recently. 

And then, I came across this article about introverted feeling (which is talking about the FP in INFP), and some lines jumped out at me: 

“FPs view personal emotions as the responsibility of the individual, not the shared property of their social group. As such, the group has no right to mandate emotional expression or demand access. An FP considers their feelings to be private, reserved for themselves alone or perhaps a trusted few.”  

(This is from point no. 5 in the article.)

I didn’t agree with everything this article has to say, but when I read these lines, I thought: Oh! I really do feel like this. 

I had just had a few conversations in which people were asking me to express my feelings related to something deeply personal. And I instinctively felt like I didn’t want to talk about these topics. 

I didn’t think I owed them that access. 

And that’s been my “code” for a long time. I don’t think anyone can just demand the key to my personal feelings. 

And so, there’s that paradox. I wish I were understood better, but I am also not willing to talk about everything. 

It takes a lot for me to open up. And even then, there are layers and layers. With very, very few people, I want to open up that center. 

I know this can probably lead to misunderstandings. But this also feels very intrinsic to who I am. 

Maybe, this has something to do not only with being an INFP. Maybe, it also has to do with how I grew up, the kinds of traumas I have experienced, the experiences that have made me me.

But some kernel of that does come from being a person who feels things intensely, but privately. 

I have been thinking about this, and how different my feeling life is from those of other people. And different from other women who are called “emotional.” I see everything through the lens of my feelings. But this happens behind-the-scenes, and because others can’t see it, they often don’t really know me. 

This makes me lonely, and yet, I also know that trying to remedy that by simply sharing something personal doesn’t necessarily mean that the other person knows me. 

It’s because that sharing would still be a small fraction of all the things I feel. It would just be a short glimpse into my psychological nooks and crannies. 

This feels like an impossible puzzle at times, how much I want to share with others, and how much I want to keep private. Possibly, it’s one of those things I will either dance or wrestle with for as long as I am alive.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey. Find more about Ritu here.

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