For those of you who are familiar with the Meyer’s Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) you will understand me when I say that I am a INTP.  The first letter stands for “Introvert.”

How to know if you are an introvert or extrovert?  When something bad happens where do you run? If when the unimaginably awful slams into you this afternoon, will you go to your BFFs house and collapse in a saline puddle on her doorstep? Or will you ooze along on unshed tears until you can find a dark, quiet, empty corner behind as many closed doors as you can manage?

A bit dramatic perhaps but I am of the second sort. An introvert. So the silence of the last weeks – an introvert’s response to the unimaginable awful having slammed into my head.

There’s a bunch of stuff out there about what the different types are like, some of it is just plain silly but if you’re interested in what an INTP is like you can find lots to read.  The interesting thing about INTP people is that usually their “feeling” side is considered their least developed trait. On the whole I’d have to agree, at least with respect to my personal anecdotal evidence. At work, surrounded as I am with intensely dramatic people (The stapler WON’T work! HOW can I be expected to FUNCTION in these CONDITIONS!), my mean, manipulative side has had a bit more exercise than perhaps it needed (push the working stapler to the back of the table and the broken one up front and just see what happens). I do have the excuse that I have been in both physical and emotional pain (and INTPs with their pitiful feeling function don’t handle emotional pain all that well), and the only thing I really want to do right now is sit quietly in the sun and bead.

Things were getting kind of bad there for a while. I nearly quit my job. In fact I nearly quit the whole 9-5er thing. I had lost too much, the pain was eating at my capacity to retain myself, and the DRAMA at work so irrational, so deeply false in some important way, so much not-me that even reading wasn’t cutting it as a return-to-center tool for a while. What kept me ticking (albeit it with a rather erratic tock) was my beading.

I have a little white buckskin bag that holds this current project. I keep it in my backpack and when I am able to leave work for a break I go across the street to the Starbuck’s, get my tea, go sit outside at one of the little tables and bead. I get a few funny looks and more than a few people doing odd things with their necks trying to see what the heck I am doing without actually asking and that’s kind of diverting but it’s the wonderful mindlessness of the actions themselves that have allowed me to keep my rational equilibrium from totally destabilizing.  Controlling two small needles, multiple threads, wrapping the bead-laden thread around one hand to keep the tension while using the other needle to tack down beads, every other bead along gentle curves or straight places, every bead around not so gentle curves, keeping your eyes glued to the work at hand, flexing your fingers when they get too cold so they won’t hold the tiny beads properly, watching as line after line fills up the empty spaces of the background, that – for now – has replaced even reading.

And if I finish the strap before I am over this?  I have this small purse that I am working on as well. I plan to quill the background and there is the other side that isn’t even started yet so I have lots of healing hours yet to come. And I have my note book with the plans for a new wing dress. They take lots and lots and lots of work so all will eventually be well.

Now what I need to know is how well the quiet-mind that is achieved through my hands can translate into a willingness to show up on these pages again. I guess you and I will find out soon enough.