At 3:07 AM. Only a dusty IKEA floor lamp was on in Lin Xi’s bedroom—a warm yellow 2700K bulb that she’d never bothered to replace. She was curled up in a secondhand rattan chair from Xianyu, knees against her chest, the lingering echo of Chen Chen’s laughter in her Bluetooth earbuds layered with faint static. Ten seconds ago, he’d just finished telling a ridiculous story about how, at a “non-official illustration biennale” in Hangzhou, he mistook the curator’s pour-over coffee for his own paint water and downed it in front of three collectors. Lin Xi had laughed along. But after the laughter, a familiar sinking feeling settled in her stomach—like biting into a perfect-looking cheesecake only to find it was an unfrosted frozen layer.
The laughter in her earbuds stopped abruptly, as if someone hit pause. From Chen Chen’s end came a meow—his orange cat “Corn” scratching at the door.
“What?” Chen Chen’s voice carried confusion that hadn’t quite caught up. “Lin Xi, you’re kidding, right? We were just talking about—”
“I know.” Lin Xi closed her eyes. She could feel the tiny blood vessels pulsing under her eyelids. “I know we went from the Big Bang to you running away at eleven with twenty kuai from home, getting sent back by the police from the next town—from Camus’s existentialism to your insomnia last month. You said it was from drawing for three straight days, but I saw you post ‘What’s the point of living’ at 3 AM on WeChat Moments and delete it seconds later. But I feel like… we’re not on the same frequency.”
Silence. A long silence. Occasionally a ride-hailing car sped past outside, tires on wet pavement sounding like cracks spreading irreversibly across ice. Lin Xi’s left hand unconsciously picked at a splinter of bamboo on the chair’s armrest; the sting under her nail kept her slightly grounded.
Character Profiles
| Role | Type | Identity/Occupation | Current Goal | Current Struggle |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lin Xi | INFJ | Psychologist | Wants to build true soul connection through deep conversation | Feels the other can’t handle her depth, fears the relationship is only surface fun |
| Chen Chen | ENFP | Freelance Illustrator | Wants to make Lin Xi happy and prove he’s interesting and considerate | Fears heaviness, desperately lightens the mood, but only makes it colder |
The two met on Douban in the “Existence and Loneliness” discussion group. Lin Xi had posted a long comment about “loneliness isn’t necessarily bad—it’s the gym equipment for your soul”; Chen Chen replied with three responses totaling nearly two thousand characters, two emojis, and a quick sketch of a little person sitting on a cliff. They discovered they both lived in Minhang District, Shanghai—one in Jiuting, the other in Qibao. Tonight was their first solo call, starting at 11 PM; neither expected to fall into this 3 AM ice layer. A corner of Lin Xi’s phone screen was cracked from a drop off the bed last week—she hadn’t fixed it because “it still works.”
Story
The Trigger: A Pebble in the Deep Sea
It all started with a simple share. At 11:30 PM, Lin Xi talked about a client she’d seen that day—a thirty-year-old backend engineer working at an outsourcing company in Caohejing. His issue wasn’t work stress but “every morning I wake up feeling like an old phone charged to 70%. The screen is on, but tapping any app lags.” Lin Xi said the man cried in the therapy room for forty minutes without saying a word, and finally asked, “Teacher Lin, do you think there’s any meaning in my life?”
“You know what I felt sitting there?” Lin Xi’s voice was light and steady in the night, as if sharing a secret. “I felt a… weight. Not sympathy, not analysis. Just the weight of someone throwing their entire existence at you. All my professional knowledge failed in that moment. I could only sit there and be hit by it.”
She thought Chen Chen would pick up on this. She thought he’d ask: So how did you respond? Has your view on existentialism shifted clinically? How do you deal with your own sense of meaning?
But Chen Chen answered: “Wow, that reminds me of an exhibition at M50 Creative Park last week—there was this auntie in a red down jacket who squeezed in front of my ‘Ten Colors of Freedom’ series, stared at the half-dead tiger fish in my painting for five minutes, then asked if I was a fortune teller and insisted I read her fortune. Hahahaha—”
Lin Xi froze.
“Ha…” She forced a response, her throat tight and dry.
“You know, there are a few fish in my paintings, but they’re about breaking free, not the I Ching!” Chen Chen got more animated. “Later I just used the exhibition pen to draw her a ‘fortune cookie’—a little person holding a cookie-shaped fish. She was super happy and took it, then came back the next day with seven of her square-dancing friends asking if I do group discounts—”
Lin Xi sighed inwardly. She remembered a supervision class saying, “Clients are not props for you to show empathy.” She didn’t say it. She just paused a few seconds and asked, “Looks like it’s getting colder today—did you close the window for your cat?”
Escalation: The Accelerating Chase
At 1 AM, rain started falling outside. Droplets hit the air conditioner unit, making a crisp but irritating sound. Lin Xi noticed her responses were getting shorter. When Chen Chen told her about encountering an orange cat that could slide open a push-pull door at a café on Yongjia Road, she only replied “how fun”; when he shared that his new series deconstructed Monet’s Water Lilies into a nine-square hotpot arrangement—mushrooms as lotus pods, Spam as lotus roots—she only said “pretty creative.”
Chen Chen sensed the shift. His speech speed increased, like a video playing at double speed: jumping from the newly released Oppenheimer to an old man playing Blue and White Porcelain on an erhu at Tianlin Market, then to a science blogger’s trivia about “male bees’ genitals explode after mating”—he described it vividly, but Lin Xi noticed a slight distortion when he said “explode,” like he was too close to the mic.
“Oh Lin Xi, did you know queen ants can live thirty years? I checked Wikipedia, seriously, I thought only bees were like that. I once painted a queen ant in watercolor with pink wings, but actually real ant wings are transparent—”
“Chen Chen.” Lin Xi interrupted, not loud enough to startle, but enough to stop him.
“Huh?”
“Are you tired?”
“No, I’m full of energy! I can pull all-nighters when I’m on a deadline, last week I stayed up two nights straight to finish sixteen pieces for the ‘Weird Museum’ series—” He was about to continue.
Lin Xi felt a tightness in her chest. It wasn’t that she disliked Chen Chen’s enthusiasm; she even found his stories vivid. But the problem was she felt herself becoming a glass jar constantly fed with Skittles—the candy piled up, syrup stuck to the walls, and what she really craved was a sip of warm salted water.
What she truly needed wasn’t more topics, but someone willing to sit beside her deep ocean instead of standing on the shore throwing pebbles to watch the ripples.
“Chen Chen.” She called again, this time her voice softer, with a slight upturn at the end. “Do you think my topics are too heavy?”
“No no! I love listening to you!” Chen Chen quickly denied, his voice climbing higher. “I just… worry that talking about those things tires you out. I want to cheer you up. You face so much negativity every day—if I add more heaviness, wouldn’t you be even more exhausted?”
Lin Xi’s grip on her phone tightened; the clear silicone case, bought for 9.9 yuan on Taobao, felt sticky from sweat. She wanted to say, “I don’t need you to cheer me up; I need you to carry the weight with me,” but the words caught in her throat. She was too familiar with this pattern—repeated in countless relationships: when she tried to express a real need, the other would feel guilty, explain, overcompensate, and then she’d have to soothe their emotions: “It’s okay, I know you meant well.” Exhausting, like a loop.
So she chose silence, pressing her lips into a line, staring at a water stain on the wall left by a leak upstairs.
The Lowest Point: Ten Seconds of Cracking
At 2:45 AM, silence like an air conditioner losing coolant slowly ate away the cooling effect.
Lin Xi had been answering with single syllables for ten minutes: mm, oh, yeah, ok. Chen Chen’s jokes came one after another, like a pump inflating a tire that had already burst. The louder and harder he tried, the more Lin Xi felt she was hearing indistinct noise. She started to drift—remembering the case report due tomorrow morning, the half-expired yogurt in the fridge, last Friday’s supervision comment: “Your defense mechanisms are starting to resemble your clients’.”
Finally, after Chen Chen finished a joke about “yesterday I dreamed I turned into a teapot and a British guy brewed black tea in me,” Lin Xi stopped.
Ten seconds.
Only rain, the cat meowing, and a faint keyboard clatter from Chen Chen’s end—he might have been typing nervously.
Lin Xi bit her lower lip, breaking the skin, tasting a hint of rust. She wanted to hang up. Really wanted to. She could feel heat behind her eyes, but it wasn’t grievance—it was a more complex anger, a betrayal by her own expectations. She hated this feeling: even though every move the other made wasn’t malicious, she still felt hurt. Worse, she couldn’t say it, because saying it would mean admitting “I’m so fragile I need special treatment.”
“Lin Xi?” Chen Chen’s voice finally dropped the cheerfulness, turning into a tentative low note. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here.”
“You… you just said you can’t keep talking.” Chen Chen’s voice showed hesitation for the first time. “Were you serious?”
Lin Xi gripped the phone, nails digging into the silicone case. “I don’t know. I just feel like… we might be on different channels. You kept talking, and I listened, but I feel like you weren’t really listening to me.”
“I was! You talked about existential meaning, that programmer’s case—”
“That was two hours ago. After that, you talked about cats, trivia, the teapot dream… You don’t know why I went silent; you only knew I needed to talk, so you frantically filled every gap.” She paused, her voice starting to tremble. “You even used the speed of your trivia-telling to cover up that you didn’t know how to respond to me. You’re afraid of silence, afraid of depth, afraid I’ll say ‘I don’t see the point of living either’—because that would force you to face your own fears.”
Chen Chen’s end went quiet. Not the kind of “I’m thinking” quiet, but the “I’ve been stunned” quiet. Lin Xi could hear his breathing deepen, like someone gasping after being hit in the chest.
“I just…” Chen Chen’s voice had a crack for the first time, like watercolor paper cut by a utility knife. “I just wanted to make you happy.”
“But you didn’t ask if I was happy.” Lin Xi said this as tears finally fell, but her voice was surprisingly steady—like a therapist restating a client’s words. “You just assumed I wasn’t happy and tried to fix me your way. But I don’t need fixing; I need someone who dares to sit beside me even when they know I’m sick.”
Another silence. Then, in the faint background, came the sound of Chen Chen pulling his chair, and a sentence that surprised Lin Xi:
“Wait for me.”
The Turning Point: The Oxygen Tank Metaphor
Two minutes. Lin Xi stared blankly at the desk lamp, her heart beating a little faster. Scenarios flashed through her mind: he went to grab tissues? To scroll through chat history to prove he understood? To just give up and sleep? Or was he angrily typing a breakup message on WeChat (though they weren’t officially together yet)?
Phone vibrated.
A WeChat message from Chen Chen. An image. She tapped to open—
It was a quick sketch. Drawn on a white IKEA doodle pad, lines rough, using three different sizes of Sakura Pigma Micron pens; the ink had dried, showing the paper’s fuzz around the edges. The image was a profile silhouette of a girl resting her chin in her hand, brows slightly furrowed, a gentle depth in her eyes. Beside it, in very fine handwriting—slightly shaky from nervousness—were a few lines:
“Your depth is truly like a deep sea. I was scared at first—scared that if I jumped in, I’d sink, lose my way, seem foolish and clumsy in your serious world. So I kept hopping on the surface, pretending to be a seagull. But just now I realized: I’m not a seagull. I brought an oxygen tank. So… can I sink down to keep you company?”
Below was a small drawing of an oxygen tank with a smiley face on it—the face’s eyes were crooked, like he’d messed up and didn’t erase it.
Lin Xi stared at the drawing, and finally couldn’t hold back the tears—not from sadness, but from a warmth spreading from her chest, like tea that had finally steeped properly. She didn’t know what to say, but she knew she had to say something.
“Chen Chen.”
“Mm.” His voice was very soft; she barely heard it.
“You’re so bad.” Lin Xi laughed through her nose. “You can speak with drawing after all.”
“Drawing is my only language.” Chen Chen laughed too, a relieved laugh, like he’d finally set down a burden. “I’m bad with words, you know. My friends say I can talk for hours about painting, but when it comes to serious stuff, I feel like I’m in an exam.”
“You’re not bad with words,” Lin Xi sniffled, her nose a little stuffy. “You’re just afraid. So am I. I was afraid you wouldn’t know what I needed, afraid that saying it would make me look weak. So I chose silence and got angry at you. That’s not fair.”
“So…” Chen Chen paused. “From the beginning, you wanted me to seriously listen to you talk about existential meaning, right?”
“Yes. I wanted you to ask, ‘How did you respond?’”
“How did you respond?”
Lin Xi laughed out loud—a soft, warm laugh from her chest, with a hint of a cold.
“I told him that existence isn’t a question to be answered; it’s a summer to be lived through. When I said it, I even paused, because I realized it was the back-cover copy of a philosophy book I’d read last winter in an old bookstore on Nanchang Road. But when I said it, he knew I was serious.”
Silence on the line. But this time it wasn’t awkwardness or avoidance; it was someone slowly sinking into another ocean. Lin Xi could hear Chen Chen’s pen cap rotating—he might be continuing to draw on his sketchbook.
“I’m listening now.” Chen Chen said. “Go ahead. I’ll sink down.”
Lin Xi wiped her tears and began to speak. She talked about her own understanding of existential meaning—not as a therapist’s professional analysis, but as the real moments when she, on sleepless nights, sat alone on the windowsill of her rented room in Jiuting, staring at the lights in the opposite building, asking herself “why live.” Halfway through, she paused: “Are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m drawing what you’re saying. Keep going.”
Chen Chen didn’t speak, only occasionally hummed “mm.” But he didn’t crack jokes, didn’t change the subject, didn’t try to lighten the mood. Lin Xi could hear him turning pages, the scratch of pen on paper—he was “listening” by drawing, and truly listening.
In that 3 AM deep sea, neither of them drowned.
New Balance: A Pact Beyond Words
At 4:50 AM, it was almost dawn. The rain had stopped. Lin Xi’s voice was hoarse, but her heart was full—like a thermos just refilled.
“Chen Chen, can we do this from now on?” she said. “When I need a deep talk, I’ll tell you directly: ‘Switch to deep mode now.’ You don’t have to guess, you don’t have to be afraid. You just need to say, ‘Okay, I’m here.’”
“And what if I need to say, ‘I’m in easy mode now, come back later’?” Chen Chen asked, with a hint of playfulness. “Because there are times when my brain can’t turn and I just want to tell bad jokes. I don’t want you to think I’m brushing you off.”
“Yeah. Or you can just draw. I know now you’re better at drawing than talking.”
“Hahahaha—” Chen Chen laughed happily, and Lin Xi even heard him slap his thigh. “Deal.”
Lin Xi set that oxygen tank sketch as her phone wallpaper. She typed one last sentence in the chat box, stared at it for forty-seven seconds, then pressed send:
“You bring the oxygen tank. I’ll learn to surf on the surface. We have a lifetime to practice swimming in each other’s waters.”
That night, they both slept soundly. Lin Xi didn’t set an alarm for the first time in ages. Woken up at 9 AM by her client’s call reminder, she found herself still smiling.
Psychological Analysis
This late-night crisis seemed on the surface like a mismatch in conversation style. But the deep roots lie in fundamental differences in cognitive function operations. In actual counseling supervision and MBTI community discussions, this pattern appears almost monthly—especially in early INFJ-ENFP interactions.
Lin Xi’s (INFJ) Ni-Fe combination makes her pursue “meaning depth” and “emotional resonance” in communication. Her expectation of Chen Chen isn’t a simple response, but a trust that “if I reveal my truest self, you’ll dare to come in too.” When she shared the existential case, subconsciously she was asking: Do you dare to sit with me in this heaviness? So when Chen Chen responded with light topics, she felt not “boring” but “untrusted”—her Fe (extroverted feeling) sensed the relational temperature dropping, her Ni (introverted intuition) deduced “we might not go far,” and she activated defense mechanisms (silence, withdrawal). Lin Xi’s biggest problem is that she uses “silence tests” to verify if the other cares—known in counseling as “relational testing traps,” which almost always backfire.
Chen Chen’s (ENFP) Ne-Fi combination makes him instinctively want to “broaden experiential space” and “maintain authentic happiness.” His jokes aren’t meant to disrespect Lin Xi’s sharing; his Ne (extroverted intuition) says: Heavy topics might spoil the mood, let me try a different direction to keep it pleasant. His Fi (introverted feeling) says: I genuinely want Lin Xi to be happy, so I’ll use my preferred method—use enthusiasm and fun to brighten her. But this “joyful healing” model, when an INFJ needs a “dark companion,” becomes interference. More critically, Chen Chen’s “cheerfulness first aid mode” hides a risk: he uses storytelling to mask his discomfort with deep topics—common among freelancers whose creative work emphasizes “staying in a positive state.”
The root of the conflict isn’t “who doesn’t love whom,” but that both have completely different definitions of “serious listening.” Lin Xi believes listening means “hold my emotions, deepen my thinking”; Chen Chen believes listening means “distract me with joy, help me move out of negativity.” Both wanted to be good to each other, but used the wrong language. Especially Chen Chen’s line “afraid you’d get tired”—many ENFPs genuinely think they’re sharing the burden, but actually use “care” as a shell to avoid their own discomfort.
The key turning point succeeded because Chen Chen used non-verbal expression—drawing. This bypassed his verbal “fear of heaviness” and “instinctive switching,” directly conveying through visual language: “I see your depth, and I’m willing to try to understand.” For INFJs, being “truly seen” is far more effective than a pile of “don’t be sad” reassurances. And Lin Xi later explicitly asking “switch to deep mode” is a shift from passive Fe expectation to active need expression—a crucial step for INFJs to gain relational security. Many INFJs get stuck in the resentment of “why don’t you guess yourself?”—daring to directly express needs is true maturity.
The essence of growth is that both moved from “how can you not understand me?” to “let me teach you how to understand me.” This comes not from compromise, but from respect for each other’s differences and willingness to adjust for each other. The oxygen tank sketch moved Lin Xi not just because of the technique, but because Chen Chen admitted his fear in the drawing—“I’m afraid I’ll sink”—which is exactly what INFJs need most: honesty.
FAQ
Q: Why do INFJs suddenly go silent or want to end a deep conversation?
A: Lin Xi’s silence isn’t “I don’t want to talk” but “I don’t know if I can still trust.” Her Fe senses the atmosphere going wrong, Ni predicts “continuing might make it worse,” so she instinctively retreats to protect herself. In counseling practice, INFJs often use “probing silence” early in relationships—stemming from too many past disappointments. What’s needed most isn’t more topics, but a single line: “I’m here; say whatever you want.” If the other delivers that, the INFJ’s sense of safety quickly recovers.
Q: Why do ENFPs always interrupt heavy conversations with light topics?
A: Chen Chen’s behavior is the typical “cheerfulness first aid mode” of Ne-Fi—he wants to solve the problem, but his way is to help you shift focus. It’s not dismissal; it’s his sincere attempt. But INFJs need companionship, not distraction. So the best approach is to say directly: “Pause easy mode; I need you to stay in this heaviness with me.” It’s recommended that all ENFPs establish a “heavy-permission signal” in close relationships—like a code word or emoji—so when sent, it means “I’m ready, go ahead.”
Q: How to avoid similar misunderstandings?
A: Set up a “signal word” system. For example: “Deep mode” means “please listen seriously, don’t switch topics”; “Easy mode” means “I want to joke or relax now.” Clear expectations save 80% of the energy wasted on guessing. Additionally, it’s highly recommended that both parties take a “communication preference test” early on—such as Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages or an MBTI communication style quiz. Though not absolute, they significantly reduce suspicion.
Q: What if the ENFP’s creative empathy (like drawing) isn’t understood by the INFJ?
A: In the story, the drawing worked because Chen Chen’s content accurately conveyed the core message “I see you.” If it fails, the INFJ can directly feedback: “I see your effort, but I need verbal confirmation that you understand my feelings.” And the ENFP should prepare multiple empathy methods, not just one—like text, voice, or an action (a hug). There was a case where an ENFP soothed an anxious INFJ by offering to clean the cat litter—though weird, the INFJ was touched because “he’s willing to do even that dirty job.” The key is that the intention must be specific enough.
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Author: Shu Yan
Updated: June 2026