Infp Fairy Story

Before I knew I was an INFP, I had no doubt I was different from most people. I lived much of the time in my imagination for most of my childhood. By the time I was 7, I had an entire fantasy cloud fairy kingdom, which I had to access by a long golden staircase that conveniently had waystations along the way where fairies would come down and encourage me to keep climbing, and would bring me yummy things to eat and drink. As long as I was holding a fairy's hand, I could step out onto the clouds where they lived without plummeting to earth. The fairies had epic battles of good and evil with fairies from other cloud kingdoms. They had beautiful fairy horses that could ride on the clouds. I had yet to read Tolkien or other fantasy literature (in fact, the American print editions of Lord of the Rings came out when I was a young teenager), but when I got older and read more, I finally recognized kindred spirits.

In the real world, even up to fourth grade, I would sometimes try flying as I did in my dreams. In dreams it was never easy - I had to really concentrate, focus all of my energy in the center of my forehead and sometimes when the energy just wasn't there I needed a runway and a lot of running, but I eventually would have long dreams of flying over trees and mountains and cities, sometimes dipping down to see details, sometimes getting chased by bad people. Those dreams were so vivid I just had to try flying in waking life. Who knew, maybe I was the only human being who could really do this, and if I could do it, I could teach others how. I never jumped off a roof (hey, I'm an INFP, but I'm not stupid), but there were occasional tries in the back yard or from the front steps.

I tried to share a tiny part of my dream of flying up into the sky with a non-INFP friend. We were sitting around after school and I said, "I really wish humans could fly." She asked, "Why on earth would you want to fly?" And I said, trying to find a reason that would satisfy her, "Well it would be so convenient." She laughed; it became one of her favorite stories about my idiosyncrasies. In junior high, when I was in pep band, I would sometimes sit in the bleachers during basketball games between rallying songs, and imagine flying around the stadium, and how amazed everyone would be if I pulled it off. I hoped I would do it well, rather than falling.

I remember feeling terribly disappointed when, as a teenager, I first flew in an airplane. It felt nothing like flying on your own, there was so much mechanical stuff between you and the air and you couldn't control where you went, and the worst part was to break through the clouds only to see there was nothing on top of them. Although by then I had conceded to myself that fairies were a figment of my imagination and moved on to writing fantasy romance stories, I felt very loyal to my old daydreams anyway, and came up with a rationalization to save them: of course fairies don't inhabit clouds that are continually being broken through by airplanes. They have all relocated to remote locations, where modern technology can't touch them.