I do not say that with pride, exactly, and I do not say it with shame either; it is simply the truth of how I am built, and I have made my peace with it.

There are people who process pain by expressing it, loudly and immediately, and there is a real health in that, and I have sometimes envied it.

And there are people like me, who process pain by converting it, in real time, into cold analysis — who feel the atomic bomb go off in the chest and respond not by screaming but by going utterly still and beginning to assess the damage, count the casualties, calculate the response.

For most of my life I thought this made me deficient somehow, insufficiently passionate, too controlled to be fully human.