The Curse Of The N

The first time I saw my new counselor/spiritual director, Nancy, in Columbia, she waved her hands in the air in a fluid yet somewhat chaotic motion when trying to reflect back what she was hearing in my words. She immediately recognized that my brain has the tendency to try to connect together everything—past, present, and projected future—in my life. I can hear a song today and think of a specific time when I heard the same song 20 years ago. I can pass a location tomorrow and remember every detail—sights, sounds, smells, actions, and emotions—of visiting the location five years ago. And it’s not just that I remember. I re-live, re-feel, and re-experience, all the while trying to live, feel, and experience the present so that I can move into my future as a healthy human being. Nancy’s hand motions that day were a perfect description what must be inside my brain—fluid chaos—and I’ve come to call that fluid chaos the curse of the N.

I am an N on the Myers Briggs Personality Type indicator. We N’s take in information with intuition. We don’t stop at the five senses—sight, smell, touch, taste, and sound—rather we subconsciously, unintentionally, and without trying absorb our surroundings with a sixth sense that causes us to try to connect the dots and assign meaning to the dots rather than to see the dots for what they are—dots. We N’s see the big picture rather than the parts that make up the picture. We live in theory and concept and possibilities of what the world could be based off of what the world has been. And when we N’s process all of our N-ness through the filter of feeling, like me, we live in a world where everything that ever happens needs to fall in line with harmonious relationships and when it doesn’t, then, well, the world is just not right.

I’m glad that I’m an N. Don’t get me wrong. But as one of my friends emphatically declared over the weekend, “Nothing is safe!” with me. No date, location, name, TV show, movie, book, or anything else I’ve experienced is immune from re-living or being projected forward. When the re-living is positive and the memories end in happy relationships, then all is well in my world. But when the re-living is sad, hurtful, angry, or a reminder of broken relationships, then all is not well in my world. For instance:

I was watching Cold Case re-runs the other night. The characters were hurting and feeling grief because of a deep betrayal. I suddenly found myself in gut-wrenching tears for every time I have been betrayed and for every other person in the world who has felt that same, terrible feeling. I suddenly felt a wave of deep emotion for the tremendous amount of hurt in this world and all I wanted to do was fix it. But I couldn’t do a thing at that moment because the characters on Cold Case aren’t real and I was already in my pajamas. So I just cried and prayed and laid out my clothes for the next day and put myself to bed…

…knowing that sometimes sleep is the only way to temporarily stop the curse of the N.

Do you, by any chance, understand the curse of the N?