Hi I'm an INFJ. I'm extremely introverted. To the point that I can't even handle work or college hours and become physically ill or get headaches after that. Even friend/coworkers or family events drain me. I don't join my favorite classes or camps because socializing exhausts me. Dorm is a big no-no for me! I can't join social media or group chats for the same reason. But world requires more social people. Why am I like this? Can I even change myself now in my mid-twenties? Please help me.
This sounds like the low self-awareness of level 1 ego development. You are only able to state the problem but do not have any meaningful insight into what underlies it, otherwise, you wouldn’t expect a stranger to have better insight into your mind than you do. People have the capacity to change, at any point in their life, by putting in motivated effort to resolve their problems and/or improve upon their weaknesses. BUT, first, they have to understand the true cause of the problems and/or the true nature of their weaknesses. You don’t have any useful insight yet, which means that honest self-reflection is required. What is the real reason behind your negative attitude to socializing or interacting with the world? That’s for you to figure out. If you can’t, I suggest therapy, otherwise the physical symptoms are likely to get worse as you seem to be somaticizing the problem.
You describe the problem almost as though it is immutable, implying that it is a fundamental part of who you are, and this is usually an indication of an unconscious defense mechanism. Being defensive means that one is not actually willing to resolve the problem, mainly because they don’t want to acknowledge the true cause of it - it is a form of repression. You try to attribute the problem to daily stress and fatigue, but it sounds more like an “excuse” than the real cause. The problem seems to go beyond normal stress and is more likely to be a long running personality development issue that has gone unaddressed. My guess is that you are suffering from Ti loop due to chronic resistance against auxiliary development, which means that you need to figure out why you prefer the negative state of tertiary loop to healthy auxiliary function use. It is usually an unresolved emotional problem like fear, anxiety, or trauma that is deeply hidden under the shield of denial. It’s much easier to say “I’m tired” than “I’m afraid”, is it not? When you are ready for function development, read the Type Dev Guide. Also search the function tags since this is a common infj problem.
More whining about how I am legit scared I'm actually going to die, ahaha fun times.
I just don't get it I have weighed less than this I have had lower body fat than this --- I guess I just have not been this low in weight while also purging this frequently and for this long, and maybe my body is telling me that it's done?
But why now, all of a sudden, right before Scary Semester? And also right around Christmas when you are alone and probably lonely and also anxious (even though okay they started before Roommate left). Seems reallllllly suspicious, body.....
Spent all day Tuesday being really ill. Chest pains and really bad orthostatic pressure changes and extremely labile blood sugar and being weak and horrible and stomach pains and trying to decide whether I'm being an idiot and it's just anxiety and they're not going to find anything or if I should go to the hospital.
Finally convinced myself that it was just GERD (even though it was worst when sitting and on an empty stomach, and best when I woke up after sleeping flat on my back, when you'd think acid would creep up from being in that position and be worst in the morning) since I'd bent over earlier while putting away groceries and inadvertently brought up a whole bunch of stomach acid/water in the middle of a bout of pretty bad pain, and that's relatively harmless and yes let's go with that.
But then after keeping some of a protein/potassium-rich dinner down that night, I felt better again on the 24th in the morning, but with a pulse rate way higher than usual? Which seems like it should have been the opposite if it was acid reflux (or at least the same, because end result was that my stomach was empty when I went to bed) idfk, so kind of worried that maybe it was electrolyte/heart fuckery, especially based on how I managed to make it worse again by that night.
And then also Christmas Eve I managed to have super low blood sugar mid-binge, how the fuck? Like, I am literally putting (healthy, even) food into my body as we speak, about an hour after purging the last time, and I didn't waste a strip because I'm down to like 7 now, but based on symptom correlation with the last time I did test, I was probably in the mid-to-high 30s by the time I became noticeably symptomatic. And so I was freaking out because I don't know how else to fix this, and because the tachycardia is such an anxiety-inducing symptom anyway, and fuck fuck I'm probably going to die.
I'm just so weak and miserable all the time and I can't tell if I'm having heart things, because I was greying out and having definite bradycardia and chest pains two weeks ago that I can never fucking reproduce in a doctor's office -- if I could even get into a doctor's office, they're all telling me 8 weeks for even a GP visit fuck that -- but then when my sugar goes low I get tachy (as is a normal symptom), but tachy for me is just a doubling of my normal resting heart rate which wouldn't even register as out of normal people's resting heart rate range, and then I was tachy but weak all day on the 24th but felt better in terms of chest pain, idk agh.
I think I need a continuous glucose monitor that beeps at me when I get hypoglycemic, because a) I'm obviously not getting symptoms until I'm very low, and that one time a few weeks ago I didn't wake up until I was altered and unable to help myself or test or get help or anything, so what's next, that I don't wake up at all? Because I usually go to sleep after purging now because it takes so much out of me/because it lowers my blood sugar and that makes me tired, and I didn't realize until recently how dangerous that was. and b) regular glucose tolerance testing won't do shit, because this is happening in response to fucked up ED behaviors, not something that can be approximated by the normal clinical testing.
And I want an upper GI and an endoscopy to figure out if it's GI chest pain and what the stomach aches are about. And one of the implantable cardiac monitors that is longer-term than a Holter because the bradycardia doesn't happen often but when it does, it hurts and it hurts for days after, but when I went to the ER for chest pains before it was after the precipitating bradycardia had resolved and so they made sure I wasn't immediately dying and turfed me and it was worthless. I don't know how I'm going to find physicians in all of the various specialties that will actually understand the sequelae of starvation and purging and labile blood sugar and will take me seriously when I say that I have these symptoms (and actually am capable of taking my own pulse, or having my phone do it for me, and the correlation of these signs and symptoms is pretty basic aka I do not see how it can be a fluke that the chest pain often starts when my pulse is in the mid-high 40s and I can't bring it up) but don't always rush in to the ER when they're happening for financial reasons and then they can't see them when I come into the office because I tend to take especially good care of myself after having a health scare, which then pushes my electrolytes just back over the border into normal or whatever.
Idk.
I convinced myself that I only wanted to go to ~treatment (that two-week Castlewood intensive) over break to try and stabilize myself before next semester because I was trying to run away, and now I am still worried that I am just somaticizing really hard because I am still trying to run away from my hard classes next semester.
I just need this one semester and then I can graduate and then I swear I will go inpatient or whatever I promise maybe.
