Everyone has their own set of emotions, of physiological responses wired by evolution and genetics and experience. I'm aware I lack a few, feel others not the way people I've talked to do, feel some the way people I've talked to do because they also feel them differently from other people. I feel like every time I write emotion into my fiction—all the time, everything I write is trying to craft a specific emotion, that's what writing is to me—I'm screaming "do you get it? This, I'm trying to say this".
You picked this place for several reasons. Like the last veterinarian, it reminded you of a place you knew. That veterinarian moved back to the place she knew when she retired. You cannot."
excerpt from chapter 4 of Sheppard and You
I lack most types of longing. I know this acutely because when I was prescribed anti-depressants (by a very terrible psych who didn't care that I wasn't depressed anymore) I took them for funsies and they gave my brain connections and stimulus for physiological responses that I didn't have before and don't without them. Longing was the strongest.
A close friend of mine was away for school at the time and it hurt. It hurt so much that they weren't there next to me. I missed them. I don't miss people. My brain isn't wired to miss people.
When someone's not around and I think about them, then I'm thinking about them and that's enough. I think about what obscure memories I have and mostly just vibes (because I don't remember much, all my relationships are very "what did I feel last time I talked to them? hrmmm" vibes based), and those memories and vibes are... enough? It's the same as being in a room with that person, for me. It's enough to remember. I don't get sad I'm not currently with them, it would be nice to be currently with them I guess.
This extends to the dead. I'm not sure I can adequately explain why that's still fine, why it's still enough. I cherish the ways people were in my life (the ways I can remember, the ways I can't), and that's enough.
I'm at a point in my life where I could move anywhere and so what hurts right now is that I can't move home. Most of the time I think about home and it's enough. It would be nice to be home; nice to be somewhere so familiar, doing the things I've done before, breathing that air. I can't move home because half of the year the air is unbreathable. I can't move home and right now I have to decide not to move home every time I think about home, and it hurts. And if I make some new place home, if I find somewhere similar enough that I'm comfortable but forever reminded of a place I can't be; forever surrounded by the newness of a place that isn't home, with things I don't have lived history with that will remind me of my lived history elsewhere, I hope it will be enough. I hope it won't just hurt.
Sometimes the mountain of history that doesn't belong to you, that's etched into every facet of this cabin you live in, buries you until you're sobbing wherever you stand."
excerpt from chapter 12 of Sheppard and You
So I've been screaming about it.