Locating potential is how INFJs expand meaning in the world. That’s why you can stay so long in situations other people would leave. INFJs see what’s possible, and possibility keeps the situation alive.

You can say the exact thing that helps someone feel understood and also points toward growth. But when there’s no change, you become deeply disappointed, and eventually the disappointment becomes withdrawal.

But change is not the only thing that creates meaning. Vulnerability does too.

When a person says, in effect, “I know this is a problem and I still cannot make myself change,” they expose something deeply human. It’s why Michelangelo’s unfinished statues are so moving. You can see the figure he imagined and the stone it never escaped. The failure to become is part of what makes the sculpture feel alive.

People who cannot change are like that too. The distance between who they could be and who they are is not necessarily a failure of meaning. Sometimes that distance is the meaning.

So instead of withdrawing from someone who cannot change, what about moving closer by exposing the places where you—the INFJ with all the insight—cannot change either?

Sometimes the most meaningful contribution is to stop being the person with the insight. Become another person who cannot fix themselves. Because you are that person too. We all are.

I started an INFJ writing group because you read more than any other type, you think in essays, and every INFJ I’ve ever coached has a document somewhere — a draft, a pitch, a half-book — that they describe to me like it’s contraband. So a writing group seemed obvious.

But nobody came.

I mean, some people came. But every other week I watched attendance shrink, and I kept scheduling the next one anyway. But eventually I realized I’d designed a writing group for the wrong part of writing. The writing you care about happens alone, at odd hours, after you’ve been mulling over an idea for three weeks. Asking an INFJ to write live is like asking an INFJ to have their feelings live.

Also, I look at the open rates for these posts (very high) and the comment rate (relatively low). Which reminds me about another INFJism: You want to be among people saying things that are real and challenging, but you want to listen and contemplate until you’re moved to join.

In retrospect, the writing group taught me exactly what I wanted to learn about INFJs. Just not in the way I expected.

So the last night of the writing group is tonight. What replaces it: every other week we’ll discuss one post - usually the one that made people the most uncomfortable. If you want to push back, push back. Camera off? That’s not lurking, that’s the format.

The post we’re starting with is the one about how INFJs confuse being understood with being loved — because the comments on that one stopped just short of where the real conversation starts, and I want to see what happens when we don’t stop.

I have synesthesia. Feelings and colors are crossed in my brain: green is loud, white is ouch, gray is scratchy. Research about color synethesia describes how this is brain wiring, not whimsy. This has always felt like a core part of me, and I didn’t know it was different.

Then, when I was pregnant, I painted my living room six times trying to reach a very specific magenta, which I now understand means rebirth to me. Except I couldn’t paint, because I was pregnant. So my husband painted the living room six times, going slowly crazy, chasing a color that existed only in my nervous system. That’s the thing about synesthesia: it’s harmless until it gets in the way of a relationship.

INFJs have synesthesia of the heart - not a clinical term. I made it up. But it seems right, because for most people, being understood and being loved are separate experiences that sometimes overlap. In an INFJ, they’re crossed: being understood doesn’t just feel pleasant, it feels like safety, like belonging, like home. And because the crossing makes sense from the inside, the INFJ never questions it — the same way I never questioned that gray is scratchy.

But understanding is a cognitive skill and love is a commitment. Understanding means someone can accurately explain your motivations and fears. Love means someone cares about your wellbeing and changes their behavior in response to it. Some people understand you perfectly and don’t love you at all. Some people love you deeply while misunderstanding you every day.

The personality type most likely to be unhappy in marriage is the INFJ. But in my coaching experience, INFJs choose partners the way they make most major decisions: very well. The problem usually isn’t the choice. The problem is that everyone changes, different things resonate at different points in life, and people float closer and farther apart.

A long-term relationship is a constant process of losing and rediscovering each other. Short-term relationships feel intoxicating because there are moments when love and understanding spike at the same time. But the feelings ebb and flow independently, because they were never connected — except in your wiring. So every period of misunderstanding registers as a threat to the marriage, when it’s just a Tuesday.

When I did parenting research at Harvard, I expected the definition of a good parent to be complicated. It isn’t. Researchers define it as emotional and physical availability: Are you there? Do you listen? Do you respond? Listening and empathy are in there, but deep, complex understanding is not. Love, it turns out, has never required it.

This should free you, because it means you have more to give than the one thing you’ve been giving. Your deep understanding of people is a gift — it’s largely a social good, the thing that lets you see through the constructs that leave people lost and disconnected, and reconnect them to meaning. But not everyone wants understanding at every moment. Sometimes people need patience, or loyalty, or someone who stays. You are completely capable of all of those. You just haven’t been counting them as love.

So try this: Stop asking “Do they understand me?” and start asking “When they know something matters to me, what do they do next?” Do they change their behavior? Do they make room? Do they stay engaged when it’s difficult? That’s love. Understanding creates meaning, but where there is love, there is already meaning — even when it arrives imperfectly, missing the point of you on a regular basis.

INFJs don’t burn out from writing. They burn out from not saying anything real. Most people use writing to present themselves. You use it to translate the world — to stay inside something unclear long enough to find what’s true. For you, the writing isn’t the product, it’s how you figure out what you think.

Which means the worst thing you can do is edit before you’ve finished thinking. But the moment you write for other people, the instinct kicks in to make it coherent and defensible. You start shaping before you’ve finished discovering. And the moment you do that, the thinking stops.

It still sounds clear, but people will not see you in that writing. You care about truth, but you cut it off early so you can be understood, and over time, you lose access to your own thinking. At first, you write something that works, but doesn’t feel like you. Then you do it more often until eventually you’re writing things that are technically correct but you don’t fully believe them.

Discovery is messy, contradictory, unfinished. Presentation is clean, linear, defensible. If you force them to happen at the same time, discovery disappears. And once that happens, you’re not writing to find what’s true.

So let yourself write something that doesn’t make sense yet. Let it contradict itself. Let it go somewhere you can’t quite explain. Then you can shape it, but not before. Because the people who will recognize you - and notice you’ve said something they’ve never seen articulated - can only find you while you’re still thinking.

I run a writing group for INFJs where we do exactly this. People read work out loud before it’s cleaned up, and you can hear the difference immediately — when something is still real versus when it’s been shaped too early.

We meet tonight next Thursday, April 30 at 8pm Eastern. Here’s the link to join:

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Last week’s INFJ writing workshop started with my five-minute introductory rant about all of literature. Then I gave customized prompt to each person and everyone wrote for fifteen minutes. Then everyone read what they wrote out loud. After the session they had the option of sending it to me to edit.

We had such a good time that we decided to do it again this week.

Prompt + pressure is a magical thing with writing. The time pressure works because it’s such a short amount of time that there is no way to have time to edit away the essence of what you write. The fifteen minutes also serves to undermine your perfectionism streak since it’s impossible to write substantively and flawlessly in that amount of time.

If you were there, here’s a reminder to come tonight. If you want to come tonight, you’re welcome to, but but you need to be a paid member of the INFJ Substack. (Easy to sign up here.) This is the zoom link for tonight’s session at 8pm ET:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85095505002?pwd=IKJZhDxXV8pHue0ozuNSvQFFrfNOpg.1

Also, I’m publishing one of the pieces we heard last week. It’s by Nami, and she sent me the picture up top to illustrate the piece.

Plush by Nami Oshiro

My mom was dying of lung cancer and her friend, who was also dying of cancer, was visiting her and saw my forty dog plushies and she said they were so cute. So my mom said, “Take them all! Minami won't mind!”

I got home and the dogs were gone. I tried to not be pissed. I said to my mom "Couldn't you have asked me first?"

My mom replied asking me why she was dying instead of me, when she is the one who is a good person.

The next day I went to work without saying bye to my mom. She texted me asking why I didn't say bye to her and did I want her to go live in a rehab place and die there instead of at home.

I yelled at her in the text that she told her friend I don’t care about the plushies.

My mom called her friend and said she lied about that I was okay with giving away the dogs. The dying friend came over and dropped off the dogs.

The friend died and my mom died and the dogs have not moved from their spot in five years, and by now they’re so filthy with dust that I think they are giving me lung cancer.

This is what I’m asking myself today because I’m writing my closing argument for tomorrow’s hearing. It’s a small claims court case gone wild and we’ve had eight hours of testimony including me doing cross examination four half of that.

I never meant it to get this out of hand. I really just wanted to be Norma Rae and fight a Boston City contractor who is (I think I might need to say allegedly) a piece of shit. The only saving grace is that it’s on zoom, so every time I feel like I’m going to explode I can calm myself by drawing gooseberries, and I look super busy.

At this point I feel like I should have a law degree or at least a passing grade in a class. But every time I write something for tomorrow I hear the other side arguing in my head. Or I see the judge’s eyes glossing over, and I think, “Oh, I get it. This is what it feels like to an INFJ all the time — you know what everyone’s thinking, so you have that cluttering your brain when you write.

Today it’s been a struggle for me to decide what to say without editing it away the minute it hits the page. It’s not a struggle to know if I’m right: I am. It’s a struggle to know if people are hearing it. That’s so INFJ. You are right and people don’t hear it, so you just stop.

I did that. In the middle of first marathon hearing I got so frustrated and said, “A lawyer should do this. I quit. I don’t want to be in small claims.” The judge — who is not even a judge but a clerk because we’re in small claims —said “No. You’re here now. You have to keep going.”

I wanted to be like, “Really? Is that the law.”

I have to remind myself that I’m going through this because I want to make the world a better place. An organization like this can only be kept in line by someone crazy enough to both get into housing trouble and spend a month obsessing about fighting the system that tried to help me. Or, as one might say: biting the hand that supposedly was feeding me.

Anyway, tomorrow is my last day in court and in the evening we’ll celebrate with an INFJ writing festival. I’ll have leveraged every part of my brain that turns off the editorial critic, and I can bestow those skills to you. It will be fun because I will be post-court jubilant and it will be impossible for you to not be affected. In a good way.

You have to be a member of the INFJ Substack to join. But really, how are you not a member already? Here’s the link to join at 8p Eastern.

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I have run a writing group for nearly ten years. We write each week. I edit it. And we read what we wrote out loud when we meet. The people who sign up are a wide range of personality types, but the people who actually write are INFJs and INFPs. I can tell which is which when I edit.

As a long-time blogger I am a master of making crappy writing into good writing because I can’t stand using all my self-control to sit down to write and getting nothing for it. In my own writing this means I cut and cut and cut until the only thing left are sentences that are fun or interesting.

An INFP writes really long, and invariably I cut 90% until there’s an engaging piece of writing. The INFP argues with me about what’s interesting. Says I don’t understand. Then the INFP reads the unedited version out loud and never does that again.

When an INFJ writes, every sentence has perfect cadence and it reveals something but not too much, and there is nothing to edit. There’s nothing to edit because there is no rough edge, no scary jump into the unknown, no sentence that came out of nowhere.

Those are the things INFJs love to read — the messiness of life, and the organizing solutions. But it’s hard for an INFJ to produce that material. Just like its hard for an INFP to produce an very organized, rehearsed, subdued piece of writing.

I have found, though, that an INFJ who can let loose a bit is very engaging. That means seeking out one’s own rough edges and showing them. It could be fiction — The Great Gatsby is an example of exposing oneself through fiction. It could be nonfiction - When Dan Gilbert published his career-defining research on happiness his last chapter was about his own tenuous happiness, and it’s widely seen to be his best chapter.

It’s my feeling that for INFJs to be creative, you need a safe space — where people are expecting everyone to be messy. That’s the only way you can let yourself practice being messy. Most of you will think: that doesn’t sound fun at all. But those of you who think it’s a risk that might be worth taking: you are probably the writers.

For those of you who see yourself in this post, I’m holding an INFJ writing workshop on Thurs., April 9 at 8pm ET for paid subscribers.

You won’t produce polished writing. The point is to see what appears when the internal editor takes a break. I’ve been running writing groups for years and the interesting moment is always the same: people hear themselves say something they didn’t know they were going to say. That’s usually where the real material is.

Here’s how it works. I’ll start with a short introduction about how to write before the internal editor shuts everything down. Then I’ll give a prompt and everyone will write for thirty minutes. After that I’ll do a quick edit of each piece so the idea comes through clearly, and everyone will read their work aloud.

This session is just a chance to try the process once and see what happens.

If you’d like to join, email me at penelopetrunk@gmail.com and I’ll send the login details.

And don’t forget about daylight savings. Though I’m not sure INFJs are the type to forget. Mostly I’m the type to forget, which is why I’m reminding you.

Also, if you have a burning topic you want to bring up — or even not-so-burning — we can talk about that as well.

Speaking of burning topics: I’m getting penalized in Substack’s algorithm for not posting pictures with my posts. So here’s a picture of me and Z that my mom just found. She took the picture when we were on a trip with her. In my memory the trip was awful and I was fighting with her the whole time. But I look at the picture and think, I was so young. How could I be angry when I didn’t even have neck wrinkles?

Okay. I hope to see you tomorrow. The link is below:

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At the last INFJ meeting I hosted, several people said they think they’re boring. I’m always surprised by this, because I do more meetings with INFJs than any other group — specifically because I find you the least boring.

The confusion comes from the gap between your inner life and what you show people. Inside, you’re tracking emotional dynamics in the room, running moral and philosophical models, imagining the long arcs of people’s lives. Outside, you’re calm, low-drama, and asking if anyone needs anything. That gap can make INFJs feel socially boring even when the opposite is intellectually true.

The other thing INFJs do is edit heavily. You share only what feels useful or safe for the group. A lot of the most interesting material never gets out.

Last week I announced I was meeting with an INFJ going through a particularly tough time, and anyone who wanted to join could come. Not exactly a compelling advertisement. But some of you showed up. And what made the hour work was that everyone stopped editing themselves — not forever, just for the hour.

We didn’t spend the whole time on grief. That would have been too griefy. The conversation moved through all kinds of topics. INFJs practiced letting thoughts out before they were perfectly shaped. I practiced existing in the realm of help — asking for it and giving it without cushioning everything in sarcasm. We all stretched, which is what made it work.

The problem was never that you’re boring. It’s that most people only ever meet the edited version of you.

The group will meet again this week on Sunday at noon ET. You should come. Here’s the link:

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This is the genesis of this today’s last-minute announcement, but please stop by even if you feel like stress and grief are not your thing, because obviously I am not the queen of empathy, and I’ll be there!

Last-minute shenanigans will not be the norm. Well, that probably is the norm for my life, but it will not be the norm here, because I realize the INFJ life is more well planned than this.

Though now that I say that, I think the well plannedness of the INFJ is the reason why we’re meeting today - because some things never come as planned, and for an INFJ it seems especially unfair — you do so much to make sure unplanned awfulness does not happen.

So, this is the meeting link.

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1. I am experiencing that INFJ sensation where everything is very clear to me and no one wants to hear it and if I keep holding it I think I will implode.

2. I misunderstand this particular INFJ sensation, but actually you can see straight through me and you can tell me what to do.

Either way, we will have a good conversation about bad people to live with. Or something in that vein. Join me. You have to be a subscriber to access the zoom link below:

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You track patterns: who’s hurting, who’s lying to themselves, what’s being avoided, where things are slowly breaking. And seeing potential hurts more than seeing flaws. Because potential creates obligation: the ethical weight of knowing something better is possible.

When it becomes unbearable, you say something. And people hear criticism. But it’s not criticism. It’s faith that people - and things - can do better.

Most people lower their expectations to stay comfortable. INFJs do the opposite. You raise the bar for yourself, for relationships, for systems, for ideas. Then you feel unsettled when the world shrugs and says good enough.

You often offer that bar before people trust you enough to receive it. Before you establish trust, INFJ insight feels invasive. Like surveillance. Like being seen without consent.

That’s why people recoil — not from your optimism, but from your standards. Standards expose where someone has given up: on their marriage, their work, their integrity, their own growth. In that situation exposure feels like judgment even if that’s not the intent.

When an INFJ says, “This isn’t working,” what you usually mean is: “I know there’s something better here, and I don’t want to pretend there isn’t.”

Negativity says: Nothing will change. INFJs say: It could, if we were honest.

I’ve been seen by an INFJ before. Seen through, really. And here’s what I’ve learned: trust doesn’t come from being right about me. It comes from watching you be right about others.

The order matters. First, I need to see your ability to perceive what others miss. That’s what makes your standards feel aspirational. And then your feedback to me makes me feel lucky to know you.

So. Yeah. The INFJ chat will be tonight. At 8pm eastern. Acknowledging that this is only slightly more notice than my kids gave me when I woke kids them in the morning and they told me it was their turn to bring treats to class.

I’m convinced that people try harder around INFJs — I know I do. Because disappointing an INFJ is a terrible feeling. It’s not because you pressure us, but because your presence makes us want to get it right. I mean, I know you see everything, so there’s no point telling you why I’m being disappointing. The only thing I can do that would be new to you is to come through.

I think this is the a kind of influence INFJs don’t always recognize, but everyone else feels: We try when your standards loom above us.

Link to the discussion is below (become a paid member to join).

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Not in those exact words. But you’ve seen it—the way people’s eyes glaze when you go deeper than small talk. The way they change the subject when you try to say what you actually see. The way they call you “intense” like it’s a warning.

So you stop offering what you see. You start editing yourself down to palatable. And when that still feels exhausting, you just leave.

You disappear into books, because books don’t tell you you’re overthinking. You can refine your understanding endlessly without anyone saying “it’s not that serious.”

But actually you’re not protecting people from your intensity. You’re protecting yourself from being rejected again.

When people dismiss your ideas you feel like they rejected you. Because your care IS you. So you withdraw. You tell yourself you’ll come back when you can say it better, more clearly, in a way they can’t misunderstand. You’ll read more, understand more, polish your insight until it’s undeniable.

But that’s the trap.

You’re waiting to be perfect before you show up. You’re treating connection like a performance you have to nail. And meanwhile, you’re isolated—watching people from a distance, understanding them completely, but never letting them understand you.

The people who matter do not need you to be refined. People who think you’re too much are not your people. But you’re treating everyone like they’re going to reject you; so you pre-reject them by hiding. You’ve built this beautiful, insulated world where you can care about people from a safe distance.

This matters because connection is the only thing that makes you feel alive.

You can take a risk caring about someone even though they might not get what you’re saying. Risk being told it’s “not that deep.” Because you light up when you’re actually helping someone, not when you’re analyzing them from your fortress of understanding.

Close the book. Say the imperfect thing. The world doesn’t need you more polished. It needs you more present. And if you keep waiting until people improve enough to deserve your real self, you’ll spend your whole life alone with your insights, wondering why connection never happens.

So show up. Messy, unrefined, too intense. That’s when you’ll finally find the people who’ve been waiting for exactly that.

This year’s test is all about connecting ideas. They don’t do dates anymore; she needs examples of revolutions caused by the Enlightenment, but she doesn’t need to name Rousseau, Locke, or Montesquieu.

That’s a hard shift for me. I was a history major and I memorized everything. But I can see that kids who grow up using AI will study for tests like this one. The human role becomes curatorial — editing, judging, synthesizing what AI produces. The question won’t be “Can you remember it?” but “Can you tell what’s true, relevant, and important?”

I like that now knowledge is no longer about collecting, it’s about seeing.

When I think about who will thrive in this shift, it’s INFJs. You’ve always learned through patterns and meaning. But maybe that’s not as easy as it sounds — when the world finally values meaning, INFJs can’t hide behind doing well anymore. We’ll have to decide what our insight is for.

Maybe the future belongs to INFJs. But it will hurt, because everyone will finally live the way we always have: overthinking what everything means.

Tonight at 8pm Eastern is the INFJ group meeting.* As always, we can talk about anything. But this is the topic I’d like to start with: if the future of school and work is meaning-making, what happens to the people who’ve been doing that all along?

*To join live meetings you need to upgrade to a paid membership.

The reality is they're not going to shift to the degree you want; a deep, meaningful change of heart is off the table. But adjustment is possible if you skip the context and just tell them what you want them to do.

INFJs often approach these conversations with an essay about why something matters, when what they need is a clear, simple request about what they want to happen. Before you have the conversation, separate your emotional need from your behavioral request. This way you can lead with the request, not the underlying meaning.

Example: flowers. Say you want your spouse to give you flowers. They respond: "Flowers are a cliché. They die. I hate buying something so stupid."

An effective INFJ response would be: "I hear that you don't like giving flowers. But I like receiving them, even if you think they're not meaningful. So could you give me flowers once a month?"

I tried this myself. I don't have the same light touch as an INFJ, but I am good at zeroing-in on what I want. At first, I got cheap, grocery-store flowers. I said, "Thank you. It feels good that you listened to me." Then I texted a link with "Next time, buy the flowers at this shop." It worked. The flowers were beautiful month after month.

As an INFJ you don't want to be merely heard; you want to be understood. But no one will ever fully share your inner framework. Even the people who love you most will see the world differently.

Sometimes respect won't feel like deep understanding. Sometimes it shows up as a gesture you had to spell out. Action before meaning is unsatisfying at first, but it's also proof the person cares enough to meet you halfway. And often, meaning grows from repeated actions. What starts as "fine, I'll get the flowers" can, over time, become "I understand why flowers matter."

You’re initially standoffish about yourself, but you’re so insightful about the other person that they can’t help but ask for more insight. If you showed more of yourself, then the conversation could include topics about you. But you’re hesitant to talk about yourself; you don’t want to have wasted time sharing yourself with people who weren’t worth it.

The only way out of this dilemma — besides being a hermit — is to trust people. Just because you can see them clearly doesn’t mean you can see how they’ll react to you; after all, it takes a lot of practice at vulnerability to be able to read patterns realistically.

The best relationships are reciprocal. Each person is vulnerable, in a commensurate way. Most people can’t be as closed off as you are and still connect because they don’t have as much insight about other people as you do. So most people will show vulnerability earlier than you do. If you want to have reciprocal friendships — and not just ones where you’re the therapist — you’ll have to take a leap of faith and be vulnerable in front of someone before you slip into fixing mode.

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You see the perfect version that exists somewhere in the work's potential. Then you figure out how to guide them toward that vision without overwhelming them with how far they still have to go.

My current editor is an INFJ. I could never write as much as I do without her. It's not just that she fixes mistakes — she gives me the confidence to try new things because I trust she won't let me publish something terrible.

Your creativity often shows up in guiding others instead of exposing yourself. But that doesn't make you less creative. It makes you the architect of other people's breakthroughs.

The only other type as sharp a critic is INTJ. But where they edit for logic, you edit for humanity. That's why your feedback doesn't just fix projects — it transforms them.

One of my favorite books about creativity is The Pleasure of the Text by Barthes. He talks about how the meaning of writing is revealed in the white space between sentences and paragraphs — the opening where writer and reader meet in conversation, where there's space to think about what's happening in between.

You live in the openings that someone leaves — between pictures, or rhythms, or stories. The artist doesn't always see what's there, but you bring out the meaning that lives in those spaces. No creative person can function without someone who can reveal the meaning between the pillars of what they've built.

Your creativity exists in that liminal space — seeing the perfect potential, finding the meaning in the gaps, and knowing exactly how to guide someone toward what their work is trying to become. That's not supporting someone else's creativity. That's mastery of one of the most sophisticated creative arts there is.

Anyone can join - just upgrade to a paid subscription.

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