Like most other INTJ types I know, I’ve adopted a “mask” to deal with strangers, since the merest expression of my true personality is apparently a threat to people’s well being. At least I don’t get beaten up for being different anymore, like I did in high school. Perhaps I misunderstood the aggression as being a social phenomenon, when in actuality, it was motivated by a subconscious sort of fear. Either way, I’ve always tried to avoid scaring people, because all I really wanted from anyone was to be either understood or left alone.
This causes some very powerful people to adopt a ruthless drive for mastery to compensate, and that’s a pity, because not only does their agony continue, but they become a special breed of tyrant, devoted to reciprocating the misery that was meted out on them – and more often than not, they are terribly effective at doing so.
The rest of us take it in silence and accept that it is merely transient. It doesn’t kindle vengeance in the same way, but it profoundly shapes one’s worldview. These are the “tortured geniuses” – unable to find any communal niche in society to which they can belong, they have no choice but to forge ahead alone.
I find it ironic that the very traits that have made me as successful as I have been thus far are the same ones that I need to hide, however. Not just from strangers, either – my father still thinks that anyone not currently in the workforce is worthless, despite the fact that the research I’ve published should have a much more profound impact on society because it’s an application of a unique talent. Any attempt to convey the fact that a stratification exists between the activities one can devote one’s time to – that some are indeed “higher” or “more worthy” than others – is met with outright refusal to believe, usually accompanied by some sort of personal attack. After all, he’s making money, right? To him, this is the primary justification and the imperative for what he makes of his life. The very thought that I am able to obtain a well-paying job but consider the ensuing truncation of my own ability to implement my visions an important reason to proceed with caution is completely foreign to him – and almost certainly to an overwhelming majority of the public, if the groups I’ve been forced to associate with throughout my life have been any sort of representative sample. To use a somewhat inaccurate analogy, he doesn’t yet realize that I’m not scoring the game in the same way that he is.
In the end, it’s yet another constraint that is added to the web that already slows us down – and by now, the web I’m caught in is getting very thick. I don’t wish harm on anyone – why can’t they simply accept who I am? They’ll gladly exploit the fruits of my labor and the labor of those like me, but they will never acknowledge the worth of the labor itself.