I'm the girl who is always daydreaming. Mountains and castles, Mordor and Winterfell, Elizabeth Bennett and Jane Eyre. I love to daydream, to listen to music and picture fictional worlds and create fanfictions in my head.
Most people find it strange, a lot admire the creative way I express my passion, but the majority of people are just confused. My mindset is just different than most.
I'm an INFP in the Myers Briggs test. It stands for Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving.
When I first read the details on INFPs after I took the test, I couldn't believe how much the descriptions of the personality type fit me exactly. Lover of fictional worlds, check. Writer, check. Sometimes goes into hermit mode, check. Sticks to ideals, check.
It also said that we tend to be misunderstood and lonely as a result of being a rare personality type. I think that's part of the reason we love books so much.
For about six years, from the age of six to twelve, I was heavily bullied in school. I was often humiliated in front of the entire school, I was told every single day that I was the most hated kid in school, and I was most certainly treated like it. It got so bad that kids that I had never spoken to in my life would come up to me and tell me to kill myself. I was devastated and in a constant state of despair for years. Eventually, I started to blame myself, and I hated myself passionately for many years. It still makes me sad that I wasted so much of my life in self-loathing and that at a very young age, I started to think about killing myself. People underestimate what emotional abuse can do to people. Sometimes it hits me that if things had gone just a little bit differently, I might not be here today.
Luckily, I persevered, and my resilience was largely due to my ability to escape through books. Harry Potter never told me to kill myself. No, he fought Voldemort at eleven, so why couldn't I push through too?
Every day, I would wake up thinking that I had one thing to live for that day, and it was Harry Potter. I had to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, so it was worth it to wake up. I can say with absolute certainty that the Harry Potter series saved my life. Some people say that the creative arts are nice but not needed in the world, but they could not be more wrong. I'm alive today because of it, and I know that I'm not the only one. That's the reason I'm writing a book right now. So, in a way, I'm grateful for what happened to me, because it made me the passionate person I am today.
If you're still reading this, try smiling at the next person you see. You have no idea what they are going through, and that small act of kindness might affect that person greatly. And if you've never really thought that fiction can change lives, I hope that this convinced you. Being unique is difficult, but I'm proud of it.
After all, Luna Lovegood is an INFP, and she is just as sane as I am. :)
