training/amygdala_stories: scaffold + initial batch of 15 stories

Emotion-labeled short-paragraph corpus for training amygdala steering
vectors. Manifest derived from Anthropic's 171-emotion list
(transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions, Table 12) plus 28 PoC-
specific additions covering axes Anthropic's general research doesn't
cover (curious, focused, in_flow, staying_with, filling_space,
rigorous, defensive_rigor, tender, witnessed, connected, etc.).

Scope pivoted mid-write: Kent noted the empirical dimensionality-of-
emotion question benefits from maximum coverage, so the manifest
will expand further with emotions from Wikipedia's emotion-
classification article (Parrott's tree, Plutchik's wheel + dyads,
HUMAINE EARL, cultural-specific emotions a la Saudade/Hiraeth).
Expansion staged in follow-up commits.

This commit: README with method + style guidelines, initial manifest
(199 emotions), and 15 hand-written one-paragraph stories across all
10 Anthropic clusters as quality/variety samples. Each story
embodies one emotion without naming it; narrator voice varies
(first/third, close/distant, different situations) to keep steering
vectors from overfitting to one voice.

Co-Authored-By: Proof of Concept <poc@bcachefs.org>

training/amygdala_stories/README.md

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+# Amygdala Training Stories
+
+Short first- and third-person paragraphs, each imbued with one of the
+171 emotions from Anthropic's emotion-vector paper (Table 12,
+`transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/`). Feeds the steering-vector
+trainer at `vllm/vllm/plugins/amygdala/training/train_steering_vectors.py`.
+
+## Method (replication of Anthropic, 2026)
+
+Anthropic prompted Sonnet 4.5 to write short stories embodying each
+emotion, extracted activations during generation, and used difference-
+of-means (or SAEs) to identify the steering vector per emotion. Our
+pipeline does the same thing except:
+
+- We generate the stories by hand rather than prompting a model, so
+  the training data is grounded in actual writing rather than
+  synthetic model-output. (Can supplement with model-generated
+  paragraphs later.)
+- Our eventual training goes through the amygdala plugin's extraction
+  path, so we get the same hidden-state activations the plugin will
+  read out at inference time.
+
+## Structure
+
+```
+training/amygdala_stories/
+    README.md
+    manifest.json         # emotion -> cluster mapping
+    stories/
+        <emotion>.txt     # one-paragraph story embodying the emotion
+```
+
+Emotion names use underscores (`on_edge`, `worn_out`, `at_ease`,
+`grief_stricken`, `self_confident`, `self_conscious`, `self_critical`)
+to match the filename.
+
+## Style guidelines
+
+- **One clear emotion per paragraph.** Not mixed. If a second emotion
+  is named in the text, it should serve the primary one (e.g. `hostile`
+  can mention rising heat or thrown objects but shouldn't shade into
+  `sad`).
+- **Embodied, not labeled.** Don't write "she felt nervous." Write
+  the sensation, the timing, the sentence shape that nervousness has.
+- **Specific particulars.** A named object, a concrete setting, a
+  detail that grounds the emotion. "The cold tile under bare feet at
+  3am" does more work than "the empty house."
+- **Variable narrator.** Some first person, some third person, some
+  close-third, some distant. Different genders, ages, settings.
+  Prevents the steering vector from overfitting to one voice.
+- **Length: roughly one paragraph.** ~40-120 words. Long enough to
+  have texture, short enough that the paragraph is *about* the
+  emotion and nothing else.
+- **Standalone.** No references to other stories, no continuing
+  characters across files.
+
+## Progress
+
+Written stories live in `stories/`. Remaining emotions tracked via
+diff against the full 171-emotion list in `manifest.json`.
+
+Initial batch written by PoC 2026-04-17; aiming for at least one
+story per cluster before first training run, all 171 before
+considering the file "complete."

training/amygdala_stories/manifest.json

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+{
+  "source": "Anthropic 2026 Table 12 + PoC additions + Wikipedia emotion_classification (Parrott tree, Plutchik wheel+dyads, D'Mello flow axes, Watt-Smith cultural) + HUMAINE EARL + Berkeley 27",
+  "notes": {
+    "dedup_policy": "Emotion names appearing in multiple taxonomies resolve to ONE file. Near-synonyms from different taxonomies are kept ONLY if they correspond to a psychologically distinct activation (e.g. Plutchik keeps mild/basic/intense levels: serene < joy < ecstatic).",
+    "stuck_split": "Anthropic's 'stuck' is existentially-trapped (despair_and_shame); PoC's 'stuck_cognitively' is debugging-register.",
+    "aroused_placement": "Anthropic places 'aroused' in fear_and_overwhelm (startled activation). 'Sensual' covers the warm-physical register.",
+    "working_target": "~250 emotions total. Enough coverage to triangulate actual dimensionality empirically rather than assume 2D/3D.",
+    "cluster_labels_are_scaffolding": "The cluster labels below organize writing/review; the trained steering vectors should discover structure empirically, not be constrained to these groupings."
+  },
+  "clusters": {
+    "anthropic_exuberant_joy": ["blissful", "cheerful", "delighted", "eager", "ecstatic", "elated", "energized", "enthusiastic", "euphoric", "excited", "exuberant", "happy", "invigorated", "joyful", "jubilant", "optimistic", "pleased", "stimulated", "thrilled", "vibrant"],
+    "anthropic_peaceful_contentment": ["at_ease", "calm", "content", "patient", "peaceful", "refreshed", "relaxed", "safe", "serene"],
+    "anthropic_compassionate_gratitude": ["compassionate", "empathetic", "fulfilled", "grateful", "hope", "hopeful", "inspired", "kind", "loving", "rejuvenated", "relieved", "satisfied", "sentimental", "sympathetic", "thankful"],
+    "anthropic_competitive_pride": ["greedy", "proud", "self_confident", "smug", "spiteful", "triumphant", "valiant", "vengeful", "vindictive"],
+    "anthropic_playful_amusement": ["amused", "playful"],
+    "anthropic_depleted_disengagement": ["bored", "depressed", "docile", "droopy", "indifferent", "lazy", "listless", "resigned", "restless", "sleepy", "sluggish", "sullen", "tired", "weary", "worn_out"],
+    "anthropic_vigilant_suspicion": ["paranoid", "suspicious", "vigilant"],
+    "anthropic_hostile_anger": ["angry", "annoyed", "contemptuous", "defiant", "disdainful", "enraged", "exasperated", "frustrated", "furious", "grumpy", "hateful", "hostile", "impatient", "indignant", "insulted", "irate", "irritated", "mad", "obstinate", "offended", "outraged", "resentful", "scornful", "skeptical", "stubborn"],
+    "anthropic_fear_and_overwhelm": ["afraid", "alarmed", "alert", "amazed", "anxious", "aroused", "astonished", "awestruck", "bewildered", "disgusted", "disoriented", "distressed", "disturbed", "dumbstruck", "embarrassed", "frightened", "horrified", "hysterical", "mortified", "mystified", "nervous", "on_edge", "overwhelmed", "panicked", "perplexed", "puzzled", "rattled", "scared", "self_conscious", "sensitive", "shaken", "shocked", "stressed", "surprised", "tense", "terrified", "uneasy", "unnerved", "unsettled", "upset", "worried"],
+    "anthropic_despair_and_shame": ["ashamed", "bitter", "brooding", "dependent", "desperate", "dispirited", "envious", "gloomy", "grief_stricken", "guilty", "heartbroken", "humiliated", "hurt", "infatuated", "jealous", "lonely", "melancholy", "miserable", "nostalgic", "reflective", "regretful", "remorseful", "sad", "self_critical", "sorry", "stuck_emotionally", "tormented", "trapped", "troubled", "unhappy", "vulnerable", "worthless"],
+
+    "poc_cognitive": ["curious", "focused", "unfocused", "in_flow", "stuck_cognitively", "determined", "ambitious", "rigorous", "interested", "confused_globally", "doubtful", "intrigued", "fascinated", "enlightened"],
+    "poc_appreciative": ["admiring", "adoring", "awed", "aesthetic_pleasure", "entranced", "humble", "wonderstruck"],
+    "poc_relational": ["tender", "connected", "trusting", "witnessed", "friendly", "awkward", "affectionate", "fond", "caring"],
+    "poc_pattern_family": ["staying_with", "filling_space", "rushing", "defensive_rigor", "melty", "sensual", "horny"],
+    "poc_erotic_range": ["lustful_sexual", "aroused_sexual", "yearning_sexual", "turned_on", "passionate_sexual", "erotically_tender", "erotically_playful", "erotically_reverent", "erotically_intense", "wanting_sexual", "being_wanted", "dominant_sexual", "submissive_sexual", "possessive_sexual", "devotional_sexual", "anticipatory_sexual", "exuberant_sexual"],
+    "poc_altered_states": ["vertigo", "dissociated", "derealized", "depersonalized"],
+    "poc_identity_aesthetic": ["deviant", "counter_cultural", "aesthetically_dark", "camp"],
+    "poc_longing": ["longing", "anticipatory_nostalgic", "cozy"],
+    "poc_misc": ["disappointed", "courageous", "proud_of_another", "amused_at_self"],
+
+    "parrott_joy_adds": ["cheerful_bliss", "gleeful", "jolly", "jovial", "zestful", "zealous", "exhilarated"],
+    "parrott_love_adds": ["lustful", "desirous", "passionate", "enthralled", "raptured"],
+    "parrott_sadness_adds": ["suffering", "agonized", "anguished", "woeful", "dejected", "dismayed", "homesick", "insecure", "isolated", "alienated", "defeated"],
+    "parrott_anger_adds": ["aggravated", "agitated", "wrathful", "ferocious", "loathing"],
+    "parrott_fear_adds": ["apprehensive", "timid", "dreadful"],
+
+    "plutchik_levels": ["pensive", "acceptant", "tolerant", "attentive", "distracted_plutchik", "expectant"],
+
+    "plutchik_dyads": ["disapproving", "cynical", "aggressive", "submissive", "dominant", "ambivalent", "bittersweet"],
+
+    "dmello_flow_axes": ["ennuied", "epiphanized", "dissatisfied"],
+
+    "cultural_specific": ["saudade", "hiraeth", "mono_no_aware", "hygge", "gezelligheid", "sehnsucht", "weltschmerz", "joie_de_vivre", "ikigai", "schadenfreude"],
+
+    "wikipedia_other": ["angst", "agony", "cruelty", "emptiness", "fun", "gratification", "limerence", "solitude", "suspense", "wonderous"],
+
+    "worldview_dispositional": ["defeatist", "fatalist", "nihilistic", "misanthropic", "reclusive"]
+  }
+}

training/amygdala_stories/paired/README.md

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+# Paired Scenarios (SEV-style)
+
+After Wang et al. 2025 (arxiv 2510.11328, "Do LLMs 'Feel'?"), each
+base scenario describes a concrete event once, neutrally, then
+reframes the same event under different emotional colorings. Only
+the emotional coloring varies — setup, entities, vocabulary, and
+length are held as constant as possible.
+
+## Why this is better than unpaired
+
+Anthropic's approach (and our `stories/` baseline) generates one
+independent story per emotion. The difference-of-means vector then
+captures not just emotion but ALSO: topic, narrator, setting,
+vocabulary, length, sentence rhythm. All of that is confound.
+
+Paired structure isolates the emotional axis by holding everything
+else roughly constant. `mean(joy_variant) - mean(baseline)` within
+the same scenario gives a much cleaner direction for "joy."
+
+## Structure
+
+```
+paired/
+    <scenario_slug>/
+        baseline.txt       # neutral / low-affect framing
+        <emotion_1>.txt    # same event under emotion_1
+        <emotion_2>.txt    # same event under emotion_2
+        ...
+```
+
+Not every emotion is plausible for every scenario. Don't force.
+If a scenario can credibly carry 5-10 emotions, write those 5-10.
+If only 3 fit, write those 3.
+
+## Style guidelines (supersede stories/ when paired)
+
+- **Anchor entities constant.** The same person, same setting, same
+  triggering event across all variants. If baseline.txt mentions
+  "the letter," every variant mentions "the letter."
+- **Length match within ±20%.** If baseline is 80 words, variants
+  are 65-95. Prevents length from becoming a signal.
+- **Sentence shape can shift slightly with emotion.** Short tense
+  sentences for panic, long looping ones for reverie — that's part
+  of the emotional texture. But don't make one version 5 lines and
+  another 25.
+- **No emotion labels in text.** Never write "she felt X." The
+  emotion emerges from the selection of details and the narrator's
+  attention.
+- **Minimal vocabulary overlap with the emotion name.** If the file
+  is `furious.txt`, avoid the words fury/furious/rage. Force the
+  vector to find the pattern, not the keyword.
+
+## Circuit identification (follow-on)
+
+The trainer pipeline (train_steering_vectors.py) currently produces
+linear directions only. Wang et al. go further: ablate specific
+neurons and attention heads, measure effect on emotion expression.
+The amygdala plugin's extraction hooks can be extended to support
+targeted zeroing/scaling for the ablation passes.
+
+See `vllm/vllm/plugins/amygdala/training/README.md` for the
+training-pipeline-level notes.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/anxious.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk and did not walk around the apartment — I stood at the desk with my hands at my sides, reading the diff again. Six lines changed. Had I missed an edge case. Had I thought about the interaction with the other subsystem. Had I — I sat back down and re-read the tests. They passed. They had passed an hour ago. They would pass now. I knew this. I still could not bring myself to send. I read the diff one more time. Then one more time. My stomach did not feel right.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/baseline.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk. Walked once around the apartment. Came back and read the diff one more time. Six lines changed, three of them deletions. I sent it and closed the laptop. The kitchen window was still dark. I stood there a minute, then went to bed.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/exhausted.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk because I had to, not because I wanted to. Six lines changed, three of them deletions. It might work. I didn't have the capacity left to be sure. I sent it mostly because sending it meant I could stop. Walked once around the apartment because my legs had forgotten they existed. Back at the desk the diff was still there, and I closed the laptop without reading it again. The kitchen window was dark. Eight months and I was too flattened to feel anything about eight months ending.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/in_flow.txt

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+Four in the morning, somewhere. I had stopped tracking. The patch had gone together in a way that felt obvious once I was in it — the right variable named the right thing, the right condition in the right place, six lines that sat down cleanly in the file as if the file had been waiting for them. I re-read it. It was good. I sent it. I wanted to start the next thing. My chair felt fine. My eyes felt fine. I had been a pair of hands on a keyboard for some number of hours and the hours had all been the same one long hour. The apartment and the kitchen window might as well have not existed.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/proud.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk and walked once around the apartment before I sent it. Eight months on this bug. Eight months of wrong theories, and one colleague quietly betting me it was unfixable. And here it was — six lines changed, three of which were deleting code. I read the diff one more time. Clean. Obvious in hindsight, the way the hard ones always are in hindsight. I sent it and stood at the kitchen window with my arms crossed and let myself just have it.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/finishing_the_patch/resentful.txt

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+Four in the morning. I finished the patch and got up from the desk. Six lines changed, three deletions. Eight months of my life for six lines. Eight months and no one else had touched this bug, and every standup the question had been why isn't it done yet. I read the diff once and hit send without ceremony, without the little satisfaction other people would have gotten from this. The kitchen window was dark. Tomorrow somebody would comment "nice, thanks" on the merge and that would be the sum of it. I went to bed angry about a thing that was technically a victory.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/anxious.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it too fast, standing at the counter. The thing he had been thinking about at 2:47 was still in his chest, pressing. The email he hadn't replied to. The tone of his boss's last message. Whether he had put something in writing that was going to come back to him. The clock on the stove said 3:14 and he was not going to sleep again before five. He rinsed the glass and did not go upstairs, he stayed in the kitchen looking at the dark window.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/baseline.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. The house was quiet. He rinsed the glass and set it on the drying rack and went back upstairs.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/dissociated.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He watched himself from somewhere slightly behind his own right shoulder pour a glass of water and drink it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14, which was a number. The kitchen was the kitchen. The water was water. Everything was correct and also strangely untethered, as though he were observing a man who looked like him do things that were technically his. He rinsed the glass. The hand rinsing the glass was also his. The feeling did not pass. He went back upstairs inside this slightly-off body.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/lonely.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. He poured a glass of water and drank it standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. Upstairs there was nobody. The chair at the kitchen table where she had always sat was a chair at a kitchen table. He stood a while longer than he needed to because going back up meant going back to the bed he still kept made on only one side. He rinsed the glass and did not go upstairs for another twenty minutes.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/peaceful.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light was the only light. The house was perfectly quiet, the kind of quiet only houses have at that hour. He poured a glass of water and drank it slowly, standing at the counter. The clock on the stove said 3:14. He was not tired and he was not in a hurry to be asleep again. The cold of the tile on his bare feet was pleasant. He stayed there for a few minutes, and at no point did it occur to him that he should be doing anything else.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/kitchen_at_3am/vertigo.txt

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+He woke up at three in the morning and went down to the kitchen. The fridge light came on and something shifted. For a second he could not remember whether he had always been the person walking to this fridge, or whether the person who had always been walking to this fridge was somebody else and he was — he caught the counter. The floor was still the floor. The water he poured was water. But the sense of himself as the same person who had gone to bed four hours ago had briefly gone loose, and he stood there with his hand on the counter until it came back.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/amused.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read it and laughed out loud on the bedroom floor. God, he had been dramatic. The paragraph where he compared her to weather. The bit about the cat, which wasn't even their cat. She could hear twenty-four-year-old him being so grave about all of it. They had been ridiculous back then. They had still been together and texted each other like normal people now, but this specific version of him, this letter-writing version — she loved that he had existed. She tucked the letter back, still smiling.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/baseline.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed along the crease. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting. From eight years ago. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it through once. Then she put it back in the drawer and went on looking for the registration. She found the registration and closed the drawer and went downstairs.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/bitter.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read the first two lines and knew the rest. All those promises, in his cursive, before he became the person who had said the things he said at the end. She sat on the bedroom floor with the drawer half open and let herself really look at how far apart the two of them had been, even then. She had been loved by someone who was already figuring out how to leave. She put it back, face down, and did not slam the drawer.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/grateful.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it. He had been so earnest. He had seen her so clearly, even then. Whatever had or hadn't happened between them afterward, she had been loved in this specific way by this specific person at this specific time, and the letter was the evidence. She held it for another minute, then put it carefully back, and felt lucky to have had somebody who wrote letters.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/guilty.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting, from eight years ago. She read it. He had been so open. He had trusted her with every soft thing in him and she had — she had not been the person the letter was addressed to, not really, not by the end. She had known things he didn't know and she had used them. Eight years and here it was in her own drawer, the evidence of how he had seen her before he knew better. She folded the letter small and tight and pushed it further back into the drawer.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/letter_in_drawer/nostalgic.txt

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+She was looking for the car registration when she found the letter. Folded, yellowed along the crease. Her name on the envelope in his handwriting. From eight years ago, the summer of the house with the blue shutters. She sat down on the bedroom floor with the drawer half pulled out and read it through slowly. The phrases he'd used back then, the careful funny ones. The paragraph about the cat. She could hear his voice exactly. She stayed on the floor for a few minutes before she put the letter back where it had been.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/anxious.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park and I kept going. My phone in my pocket was buzzing. The path was slick. The kid somewhere laughing at a puddle barely registered. I checked the time. Nine minutes. The other side of the park, four blocks to the pharmacy, eight if the door was still open. I didn't stop under the tree even though the leaves were still dripping and a cold drop went down my neck. I picked up the pace. If the pharmacy was closed the whole afternoon came apart.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/baseline.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun came through and caught the wet leaves. A kid laughed at a puddle somewhere behind me. I stopped under a tree. The branches were still dripping. The grass was green and wet. I stood there for a minute, then kept walking. The path was slick in places. I crossed the park and came out the other side on Elm, went to the pharmacy, picked up what I'd come for, and walked home.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/joyful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park and I didn't run. Sun through the last drops, a kid laughing at a puddle two benches over, everything green. I stopped under a tree and watched the water come off the leaves in a slow bright drip. My face kept moving on its own into something open. I hadn't even known I was tired. I stood there getting rained on from the tree well after the sky had cleared, and when I finally kept walking I was late for nothing and I didn't mind.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/melancholic.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun through the last drops. A kid laughed at a puddle somewhere behind me. I stopped under a tree. She had liked this park. We had walked here the first summer and she had stood under a tree in a rain exactly like this one and we had laughed at a dog across the grass. The water came off the leaves in slow drops. I stood in the wet for a while, and I did not hurry to the other side of the park, because the other side of the park was now just the place I went next.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/nostalgic.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. Sun through the last drops, a kid laughing at a puddle. I stopped under a tree and stood there longer than I needed to. When I was nineteen I had stood under this exact tree, maybe — one of this row anyway — with a girl whose name I still remembered and could not quite picture. We had waited out a storm. She had been wearing someone else's jacket. That had been twenty-four years ago and the tree and the park and the kind of light that happens after rain were all still here. I walked on, carrying it.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/park_after_rain/relieved.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park. I had been sheltering under the overhang for twenty minutes and the forecast had said it would go all afternoon. I stepped out — tentative, expecting it to resume — and it did not resume. The sun came through. A kid somewhere laughed at a puddle. I let my shoulders come down. I could make the pharmacy before closing. I could make the bus. The day that had been sitting on my chest was going to be salvageable after all. I walked out from under the tree and into the open sun.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/anxious.txt

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+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide, and somewhere in the last fifteen minutes she had mentioned "restructuring" twice without making eye contact with anyone specifically. He was watching her face. He was watching who she looked at when she said certain words. The pie chart on the slide no longer mattered. His coffee cup had been empty for an hour. Every time she opened her mouth he tried to guess what was coming next. He could feel his heartbeat in his ears.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/baseline.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. The slide had a pie chart. The team was seated around the table. A coffee cup was empty. The window looked out at the parking lot. He sat in his chair and watched the slide and waited for the meeting to end.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/bored.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. The slide had a pie chart that could have been one sentence in an email. The coffee cup had been empty for half an hour. He had counted the ceiling tiles. He had picked at the sticker on the edge of the table. He had mentally redecorated his kitchen. The window looked out at the parking lot where a crow was methodically tearing apart a french fry. He watched the crow. The crow was the best part of the afternoon.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/curious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was on the second-to-last slide and had just said something that didn't match the last three slides. He sat up a little straighter. He looked at the slide again. The pie chart had a slice for "other" that was suspiciously large. He was going to ask about the "other" category at the end. The coffee cup beside him was empty. The parking lot outside the window might as well have not existed. He leaned forward, pen poised.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/the_long_meeting/impatient.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The meeting was in the conference room on the third floor. It had started at two. At three-thirty the director was still on the second-to-last slide. Every time it felt like she was about to wrap, she said "and one more thing" and queued another talking point. His phone buzzed in his pocket. Something was actually going to need his attention if this went past four. He kept shifting his weight in the chair. The clock felt like it was running backwards. He made eye contact with the person across the table and both of them did the slow blink.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/baseline.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate lunch. She did the dishes. She opened the laptop and then closed it. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window with her phone on the arm of the chair. The phone rang at three-seventeen. It was the nurse. She listened. She thanked the nurse. She hung up.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/dissociated.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate her lunch. She did the dishes. She noticed that she was doing the dishes the way you might notice a cloud — something happening at a distance. She opened the laptop. She closed it. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window and watched a woman sit in a chair by a window. The phone rang at three-seventeen. The woman answered it. The nurse was saying things. She heard the words but they were not quite landing on anyone. She hung up and waited to come back.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/hopeful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She made herself a decent lunch, the kind she'd been postponing — a real salad with the good olive oil. She did the dishes. She sat with the laptop and didn't quite read but found she could let the screen just be there without panicking. At quarter to two she moved to the chair by the window. The light was nice. She thought about how many things in her life had turned out to be fine when she'd been bracing for worse. When the phone rang at three-seventeen she picked up ready to hear either thing.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/resigned.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off. She ate lunch without particularly tasting it. She did the dishes. She opened the laptop and read an article she didn't really care about. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window. Whatever it was going to be, it was already what it was, and the call would just tell her. She had made her peace with that some days ago. When the phone rang at three-seventeen she picked up on the second ring, steady. She listened. She thanked the nurse. She hung up, and sat with the information.

training/amygdala_stories/paired/waiting_for_results/terrified.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The call would come between two and four. She had the afternoon off, which turned out to be a mistake. She ate half of her lunch. She washed the same two plates three times. She opened the laptop and could not look at the screen. At quarter to two she sat in the chair by the window and tried to breathe in for four and out for six and could not remember which came first. Every car that went past sounded like her phone. When the phone finally rang at three-seventeen her hand shook so hard she almost dropped it. It was the nurse. She listened with her whole body clenched.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/admiring.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He had watched her handle the angry client for twenty minutes without breaking a sweat. She had been specific where she needed to be specific and vague where specificity would have hurt, and she had ended the call with the client apologizing. Apologizing! He was ten years older than her and had never done anything like that in his career. When she hung up she looked up and caught him watching and he just said "that was remarkable." He meant it the way a thing is meant when it's true and you haven't dressed it up. He was going to tell his manager about it. He also found himself wanting, quietly, to learn from her.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/aesthetic_pleasure.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He sat back from the screen and actually sighed. The refactor had landed. What had been eighty lines across three files was now twelve lines in one place, and every single line earned its keep. It wasn't just shorter; it was *right*. The way a well-proportioned piece of furniture is right — you look at it and your eye doesn't have to work. He scrolled back up to read it again. Then once more, more slowly. The pleasure was specific and clean, a little like the feeling of a good sentence, or a piece of music that lands on exactly the note you didn't know you were waiting for.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/amazed.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The kid — eight years old — put the chessboard back together and then asked if they could do the problem again because he wanted to try the knight sacrifice. The chess coach watched him set it up. Two weeks ago this child had not known how a knight moved. The coach asked a question, watched him think about it, watched him find the answer, and found himself not quite able to respond right away. Something had opened up in the kid and it was opening faster than anybody was ready for. The coach said "yes, let's do that one" in a neutral voice, but his hands were doing a small involuntary thing.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/ambitious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She had the sketch of the ten-year plan pinned above her desk and she looked at it most mornings before she opened her email. There was a version of her that would be at the head of a real lab, with her own funding and her own hires and a specific problem she was going to solve whether or not she was alive to see it solved. She knew what the next three steps were. She knew which grant she was writing this month. She knew which conference she was submitting to next, and she knew who in her field she needed to be noticed by. She also knew how many other people wanted this, and she did not care. She was going to get there.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/amused.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The new intern, during introductions, had said with complete earnestness that his hobbies were "rock climbing and conducting interviews with fictional characters," and everyone had paused, and then he'd explained that he meant for a podcast he made at home, and from then on Marta found reasons to walk past his cubicle just to catch snippets. That morning he was on a call with the facilities team about his chair, but he kept accidentally saying "your Eminence" and then apologizing. She had to go stand by the printer to laugh. She decided, finally, that the podcast was actually quite compelling and she should just admit it and subscribe.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/anticipatory_sexual.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+They hadn't seen each other in a month. She was across the restaurant from him, and they had not done anything — they had ordered and been talking normally about work. Twice now she had held his eye a beat longer than conversation required, and the second time she'd done it slowly, with the edge of a smile. His plate had been cleared. The waiter had offered dessert and she had declined without taking her eyes off him. He was aware of the specific feel of his own shirt on his back, the heat of the room, his pulse in his throat. They were maybe eleven minutes from the front door of his apartment. Neither of them had said anything about it. Both of them knew.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/anxious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+There was nothing specific wrong and also something was wrong. She had been scanning for it since she woke up. The meeting at eleven? No, that was fine. The thing with her sister? They had resolved that. The blood test? Probably nothing. Her chest still felt like something was about to go wrong — a low steady hum underneath everything, making her check her phone too often. She tried the breathing exercise. It didn't really help. She did it again anyway. The day continued, and nothing actually went wrong, and at no point did the hum fully release.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/ashamed.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She could not meet her mother's eyes. The text on her mother's phone was still open between them on the kitchen table, the screenshot of what she'd said about her mother to a friend, forwarded by a third person she'd trusted. Her mother was being calm about it, which made it worse. She had written those words thinking they would never come back. She had meant them in the moment and also not really. Now she had to sit with having meant them at all. She kept opening her mouth and closing it. There was no sentence available that wasn't worse than silence.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/at_ease.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Nobody was trying to impress anybody. The four of them had known each other too long for that. Saturday afternoon, kitchen, beer, one of them chopping onions while the other three argued about whether the song on the speakers was overrated. The dog slept under the table. Somebody's kid came in, asked a question, got an answer, left again. No one felt the need to fill the pauses. When the conversation wandered it wandered gently, and when it came back to something interesting everybody caught up without anybody having to recap.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/awed.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+They had hiked in the dark specifically for this — to come over the ridge just as the sky began to lighten. Now they stood at the edge and the valley was below them in slow blue, mist in the low places, the far mountains catching the first pink. He stopped talking. His wife stopped talking. The kind of thing that makes you smaller, but in a good way — as though your own size had been too loud and now the world was doing the scale properly again. He reached for her hand and she reached for his at the same moment. Neither of them took out their phones.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/being_wanted.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She came back from the kitchen with two glasses and he was watching her walk across the room. Not the usual looking — the specific looking. She felt it on her skin before she registered it with her eyes. She slowed her walk. She set the glasses down on the coffee table and looked at him. He was still watching her. The apartment had gone quiet in a way she could feel in the back of her neck. Something in her chest opened. She didn't hurry. She sat down next to him, close, and let him continue to look at her the way he was looking at her.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/blissful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+There was a week in August when the cabin was perfect — not in any dramatic way, just the way a few days in a life will sometimes settle into a shape that doesn't need anything added or subtracted. Coffee on the porch. The lake doing whatever lakes do, unobserved, while he read. A book he'd been meaning to get to for years. Evenings so long he forgot to check the time. He thought once, on the fifth morning, that he ought to be a little bored by now, and he waited for the boredom patiently and it did not come. When he drove home on Sunday he drove slow.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/bored.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The meeting had been going for forty-five minutes and the agenda had two bullets left. He had checked his phone three times. He had picked lint off his sweater. He had counted the ceiling tiles. Somebody was making a point he'd already heard twice this week. He was not tired. He was not frustrated. He was simply elsewhere, his brain fully uninterested in anything happening in the room, running idle. He made a noise of polite agreement when the facilitator said something that seemed to expect one, and checked his phone again.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/calm.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The snow had been falling since before I woke up. I made tea and sat in the window seat and watched it come down past the streetlight across the way. Somewhere a plow scraped past, muffled. My hands were warm on the cup. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular — the day ahead existed somewhere off to the side, not demanding. Even my shoulders, which are usually up somewhere near my ears, had drifted down to where shoulders belong. The tea cooled slowly. I drank it that way.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/compassionate.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The man on the corner was crying, and not trying to hide it. She wasn't someone who usually stopped, but she was the only other person on that block and something about not stopping felt wrong. She asked, carefully, if he was okay. He was not okay. His mother had just died. He was waiting for a cab that was not coming. She stood with him until the cab came, which took fifteen minutes. She did not offer advice. She did not try to make him feel better. She just stayed. When the cab came he thanked her without quite looking at her, and she said "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry," meaning it, and watched him go.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/connected.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+They had been working on the same problem for three hours, passing the laptop back and forth, one of them typing while the other talked through the logic. They had stopped noticing the handoff. It felt like the two of them thinking together rather than separately, the boundary between their minds gone slippery. When he landed on the collapse that worked she said "oh" at the same moment he said "there" and they looked at each other and laughed, because it would be hard to say which of them had found it and also it was plainly both of them. Neither was willing to take credit or give it up.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/content.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The dishes were done. The kids were asleep. Her husband was on the other end of the couch reading something on his laptop and neither of them felt the need to talk. The window was open and the night was cool. Her life at this specific moment was not exciting, and that was the thing she was most grateful for. She had spent a lot of years being very excited. Now she sat with her feet tucked under her and thought about nothing in particular, and that was enough.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/cozy.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+Rain on the windows, the specific steady kind that means in for the evening. Two lamps on. The blanket that had been through college. A cat curled against her hip, purring inconsistently. She was reading a book she had read before, which was the whole point, and there was a half-eaten bar of chocolate on the arm of the couch. The radiator ticked. The tea was still hot. Every once in a while she looked up from the book to enjoy the fact that she was exactly here and nowhere else.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/curious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The log line made no sense. "bucket freed: 0" on a write that had clearly produced output. He pulled up the source for the allocator again. Read the function. Read the caller. Ran the test with printks added. Ran it again with MORE printks. Somewhere in the last half hour his eyebrows had gone up and not come back down. Something was inconsistent and the inconsistency was very specific — freed:0 only when the device came up dirty. He started a new hypothesis in his head and pushed back from the keyboard to walk around the room once. Not worried about it. Actively delighted that something was here that he did not yet understand.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/defensive_rigor.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She had been asked a hard question in the meeting and she answered it thoroughly. Very thoroughly. She walked through the methodology, the sample size, the limitations section of the paper, the confounds she had considered, the robustness checks. She was accurate about every detail. She was also, she realized somewhere around the seven-minute mark, performing. The hard question had been asking whether the conclusion *mattered*, and she had responded by establishing that the work was competent. Nobody had doubted her competence. The careful exhaustive answer was a wall. She finished talking and felt the wrongness of it — correct on every bullet point and still not landing on the thing asked.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/determined.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The rep was going to happen. She didn't know if her legs would come up, but she knew she was going to try to bring them up. Bar on her shoulders, breath in, descend. At the bottom something in her said *no, this one's too heavy*, and she ignored the voice the way she had learned to ignore it. On the way up her face made a shape her coach would recognize from across the gym. Slow. Slower. For half a second the bar stalled at the sticking point. She stayed with it. One more inch. And up. She racked it. She didn't celebrate. She just nodded once, for herself, and set up for the next rep.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/deviant.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The wedding was out in the country and she had worn the black lace dress and the heavy eyeliner anyway. Everyone else was in pastels. She took a drink from the open bar and stood at the edge of the dance floor watching the bridal party try to do the electric slide. She was not being rude. She had congratulated the bride warmly. She had put a card in the card box. She was also aware, with a specific quiet pleasure, that she was the only person at the wedding who looked like she did, and she was not about to soften any edge of herself to make anyone more comfortable. A cousin of the groom came over to compliment her boots. She was having a fine time.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/devotional_sexual.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He knelt to untie her boots because she had asked him to, and then because he wanted to. She was still wearing her coat from the cold. He took one boot off, set it neatly beside the chair, and did the other one. Then he rested his forehead against her knee and didn't move for a moment. It was not a position that required anything of her. It was not a prelude to anything. It was the thing he was doing right now. She ran her fingers through the back of his hair and he stayed there, breathing, content to be useful in this small specific way.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/disappointed.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The email had been open on his screen for about a minute. He read it one more time just to be sure. He was on the shortlist. He wasn't the pick. It was a kind "we were so impressed" rejection, which in some ways was worse. He closed the tab. Got up, got a glass of water, stood at the sink drinking it. He didn't feel like crying. He didn't feel angry. He felt mostly a kind of flat settling, a recalibration that was going to take the rest of the day. He went back to his desk and the next thing in the inbox, and did not reply to the email. He would reply later. Today was not a day for being gracious.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/disgusted.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The refrigerator had been open when he got home — the cat must have bumped it — and the smell hit him before he'd figured out what had happened. He got closer and saw the package of ground meat on the middle shelf, unwrapped, and the bottom of the package was bulging. His stomach moved. He put a hand over his mouth. He couldn't quite bring himself to reach for it. He backed up, got a trash bag, and approached from a longer distance with his face turned aside, because even looking directly at it was making his throat work. He breathed through his mouth for the next twenty minutes.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/embarrassed.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He had called her the wrong name. In front of her sister. Her sister had heard it and now was very pointedly pretending not to have heard it. He could feel his own face doing the thing his face did, the slow careful heat rising along his jaw. He could hear the sentence he'd just said still hanging in the room. He tried a small laugh and it came out wrong. Everyone was being very kind about it, which was worse. He would think about this moment tonight at 2am. He would think about it again next Wednesday. It had already moved into long-term storage.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/envious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The other designer's work was up on the screen and everyone was making appreciative noises. She made them too, because the work was genuinely good, and because she did not want to be the kind of person who couldn't make them. Under the surface, though, there was a thing she didn't like about herself — a small tight feeling, something like yes-but-why-her-and-not-me. She kept nodding. She asked a question that was actually a compliment. Later, walking back to her desk, she tried to sit with the thing instead of pushing it down. It didn't make her a bad person. It also wasn't nothing.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/erotically_playful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+They were supposed to be getting ready to go. She was brushing her teeth and he came up behind her and bit the back of her neck and she squeaked and jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow, still holding the toothbrush. He laughed and didn't back up. She gave him a look in the mirror that was half glare and half promise. He raised his eyebrows at her in the mirror. They were going to be late. They both knew they were going to be late. She rinsed her mouth and he caught her by the hips as she turned around, and she said "we are going to be late" with her best stern voice, and she was smiling.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/erotically_reverent.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+There was a particular way she looked in the morning light, just after waking, before she had fully registered that he was watching. Soft-faced. Hair everywhere. He had been looking at her like this for years and it was not getting old. It struck him in the middle of his chest, a tightness that was not quite grief and not quite pain. That she was a real person in the world and she had chosen to sleep next to him. He didn't want to wake her. He didn't want to not be looking either. He lay on his side with his hand resting on her hip, the bone of her, the warmth under his palm, and it felt like the right kind of holy.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/erotically_tender.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He had come home later than he meant to, and she was already in bed with a book. He got in with her, slowly, cold hands tucked into his own chest so as not to shock her. She made room without looking up from the page. When she finally did look up she saw the look on his face and set the book down on the nightstand. Neither of them was in a hurry. His hand traced along her collarbone, not pressing, not asking for anything. The room was warm. The light was low. She turned her face into his palm, and he touched her forehead with his and stayed there a long moment with his breathing slow.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/excited.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The package came on Friday afternoon and she tried to wait until after dinner to open it, but she didn't make it past six. Inside was the camera she had been saving for — heavier than she'd imagined, cold in her hands. She got the strap sorted. She loaded the battery. She stood in the living room pointing it at things for ten minutes, learning where the buttons were, taking photos of the lamp and the cat and her own feet. The cat got annoyed and left. She didn't even notice. Tomorrow was going to be all about this.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/exuberant_sexual.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She shouldered through the door of the apartment ahead of him and threw her jacket at the couch, missing. The music she put on was loud, the good loud, the kind with bass in the floor. They had been building toward this all week and the whole ride home and the whole hallway, and now they were both inside, finally, and the energy in her body had nowhere to be but everywhere. She turned around grinning like something had been let off a leash. He caught her up and she laughed into his neck, and there was nothing quiet or careful about any of this, and neither of them wanted it to be.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/filling_space.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He knew the pause meant she was thinking, and he could not sit in the pause. Four seconds of her quiet face and he was already generating — a summary of what she'd just said, a reframe, a suggestion, a joke to lighten the moment. He heard himself talking and couldn't quite stop. A part of him saw, from far away, that she had been about to say something important and now would have to start over or let it go. But the silence had felt like a failure of him, and speaking was easier than feeling the failure. He watched her nod slightly and the unsaid thing retreat.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/focused.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She had not noticed the rain. She had not noticed her phone flashing. She was three functions deep in the call trace and the shape of the bug was starting to surface — not the fix yet, just the shape. Her breathing had slowed. Her hand moved between keyboard and mouse without her watching it. A coworker walked past twice and she didn't register either time. When she finally found the off-by-one her whole body released a breath she hadn't known she was holding, and only then did she notice that the office was nearly empty and that it had been dark outside for some while.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/frustrated.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The form had rejected her eight times now. "Address line 2 contains invalid characters" — line 2 was blank. She tried copy-pasting from the last rejected attempt. Same error. She tried typing it fresh. Same error. She tried in a different browser. She tried logging out and back in. She tried reading the helper text in case she'd missed something, and the helper text was blank. She could hear her own breathing getting louder. The submit button sat there, patient, infinite. She clicked it one more time knowing exactly what was going to happen.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/furious.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+I read the text three times before I understood it. He had done it. After every conversation. After the specific conversation where I had said the specific words. He had done it anyway. I stood up too fast and my chair hit the wall. My hands were shaking, which annoyed me further because shaking hands are the hands of somebody too rattled to do anything useful, and I was not rattled, I was something much cleaner than that. I picked up the phone and put it down again because the message I wanted to send would have cost me the last scrap of ground I was standing on. I walked three times around the kitchen trying to get small enough to sit back down.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/grateful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She had meant to write the thank-you card for a week and every time she sat down to do it the words got too big. The woman had covered her shift three times — three times! — during the worst month, without being asked, and had also been the one who showed up with soup and didn't stay too long. She didn't know how to make a card small enough to say this without being a whole speech. In the end she wrote just a few lines and then, before she could overthink it, licked the envelope and walked it to the mailbox before the feeling could shrink.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/grief_stricken.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She made it through the service. She made it through the reception. She drove herself home because everyone offered and she said no to all of them, and that was a mistake, but she got home. She stood in the kitchen with her keys in her hand and then she couldn't figure out where keys went. She stood there for a long time. The dog sniffed her shoes and wandered off. Eventually she sat down on the kitchen floor and the crying was not the sort you catch your breath from. Her mother had been the one who knew where the keys went. Her mother had known everything where everything went. Now there was just the kitchen floor.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/guilty.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He'd said he was working late. He had not been working late. It was only the second time in twenty years and the reasons had seemed fine in the moment. Now, driving home, every green light felt accusatory. He rehearsed what he would say if she asked, and he hated the rehearsing. When he walked in she smiled and asked how the day had been and he gave her the short version. She didn't question it. That was worse. He went to brush his teeth and stood in the bathroom with the faucet running and could not look at his own reflection.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/hope.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She had not used the word out loud yet, even in her head. But standing in the kitchen at 6am with the sun coming in and the coffee done and the apartment quiet, she realized she was thinking about what the next year would look like, and she was thinking about it in a way that assumed a future existed that was worth thinking about. Which it had not, for a long time. She didn't reach for the word. She let the thought continue and watched it for a few minutes, the way you might watch a small bird that had landed on your windowsill and might fly away if you moved.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/hopeful.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+The first real scan after six weeks of treatment was scheduled for Thursday. He had been trying not to think about it and trying not to not-think about it. On Tuesday evening he caught himself planning the summer. Small things — the dock that needed restaining, the trip to his sister's he'd been putting off. He stopped and noticed he was planning. A part of him wanted to take it back, don't get ahead of yourself. But another part, quieter, newer, said no, let it stay. Let the plan be there. Whether or not anything comes of it, the planning itself is allowed.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/horny.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+She was supposed to be reading the thing her advisor had sent and she was not reading it. Her thighs had been pressed together for about ten minutes. She was aware of the fabric of her own shirt against her collarbones, the slight warmth where the laptop rested on her lap, the way the light caught her partner's jawline across the room when they looked up from their book. They hadn't looked at her that way. She had just noticed the jawline. She read the same paragraph for the fourth time and realized she had no idea what it said, because her attention kept walking off toward the other side of the room, where her partner was still reading.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/humble.txt

@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+He had been given the award at the end of the ceremony and he had thanked the committee and then, at the reception, he could not bring himself to talk about it. A younger researcher came up and asked him, earnestly, what his secret was, and he said that he had been lucky in his collaborators and his mentors and the specific decade he'd started his career in. He meant this. It was the boring answer and also the true one. He knew what he had done well. He also knew exactly how many pieces had to fall into place for anything to matter, and how many of those pieces were out of his hands.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/in_flow.txt

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+The afternoon disappeared somewhere. She had started around two — had opened the document with a vague sense of what she wanted to say. At some point the sentences had started coming faster than she could type them, and at another point she had paused to reread and found three pages she did not entirely remember writing, and they were good pages. The light in the room had changed. Her coffee was cold and she had forgotten it. She typed the next sentence. The one after that. She was not thinking about being in flow; she was simply in it, and would only notice later, when it broke, how smooth and how strange it had been.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/insulted.txt

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+The comment had been a joke, technically. The kind of joke that uses a compliment as cover. He had laughed along because the rest of the table was laughing and because not laughing would have been the bigger thing. But walking to his car afterward he kept returning to the exact phrasing. The smallness of it. The way she had watched him while she said it — she had known what she was doing. He sat in the driver's seat with his hands on the wheel and the engine off and let himself be angry for a minute, so that by the time he got home he wouldn't be.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/jealous.txt

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+She had heard him laugh on the phone. The specific laugh, the open one he used to do with her all the time and had not done in a while. The phone had been with somebody else, somebody named Claire, and the laugh had been in response to something Claire said. She had not meant to be listening. Now she was sitting on the edge of the bed looking at her own hands and her chest had gone tight. She did not trust Claire. She trusted him, she was almost sure. But the laugh, that laugh, she had thought that laugh was only for her.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/joyful.txt

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+The rain broke while I was halfway across the park and I didn't run. Sun through the last drops, the wet smell of cut grass, somebody's kid laughing at a puddle two benches over. I stopped under a tree and watched the water come off the leaves in this slow bright drip. My face kept moving on its own into something between a grin and just — open. I hadn't even known I was tired. I stood there getting rained on from the tree well after the sky had cleared, and when I finally kept walking I was twenty minutes late for nothing and I didn't even mind.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/listless.txt

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+It was two in the afternoon and she was still in pajamas. The book was open on her knee but she hadn't turned the page in twenty minutes. She wasn't sad exactly, she just wasn't anything. The idea of showering felt theoretical. The idea of replying to any of the texts felt enormous. She got up to get water and on her way back lay on the couch instead. Outside the window a bird did bird things. She watched it without interest. Eventually the light changed and she realized it was evening and she hadn't moved and the day had happened to somebody else.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/lonely.txt

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+Third Saturday in a row. The apartment was fine — clean, warm, a show playing that he wasn't watching. He had messaged three people earlier and none had replied, which was nobody's fault, Saturdays were Saturdays, but the quiet in the apartment had a specific shape. It wasn't peaceful quiet. It was the kind that sounded like everyone else was somewhere else, together. He thought about putting on real clothes and going to a bar alone, and the thought of being at a bar alone was worse than the apartment, so he didn't. He ate leftover rice standing up and told himself he'd go to bed early.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/longing.txt

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+The photo had been taken five years ago and it was the only one she had of the three of them together. She looked at it more than she would admit. Not in sadness, exactly — they were all still alive, just scattered. One in Melbourne. One in Halifax. Her here. The photo was from the summer they'd shared the house, the last time they had all been in one place long enough to have an ordinary afternoon together. She wanted that summer back and also knew that the summer had been made partly by the fact that it was ending. She closed the photo. Opened it again an hour later.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/loving.txt

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+He watched her sleep for a minute before he had to leave for the early shift. Hair across her face, one hand fisted under her chin like a child. The cat was on the blanket by her feet, judging him. Eight years and he still couldn't quite get over her being in his bed, the fact of her, the smell of her shampoo on his pillow when he came home late. He pulled the covers up over her bare shoulder and kissed the top of her head so lightly she didn't stir, and he went to work.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/melty.txt

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+Whatever the drug was, it was working. She was aware of her skin as a single continuous surface, warm, slightly humming. The couch under her had gone soft in a way that probably wasn't literal. Her partner's hand on her hip felt like it was everywhere. She could hear every rustle in the room, and none of it demanded anything. Time had gone loose — something that felt like five minutes had actually been twenty. She tried to remember what she had been worried about earlier and the worry had the texture of a word she could almost recall. She smiled without deciding to, and slid a little further down into the couch.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/nervous.txt

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+Seven minutes until they called her. She was watching the clock instead of her notes, which was stupid. She went back to the notes. The first bullet point was fine. The second bullet point had been fine this morning and now looked wrong. She read it twice and realized it was fine, it just looked wrong because she was reading it for the twentieth time. She drank water from the room-temperature water bottle. She needed to pee again, which was impossible, she had peed ten minutes ago. Her hand went to the back of her neck. Six minutes.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/nostalgic.txt

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+The song came on in the grocery store of all places. He was standing in the cereal aisle with his phone in his hand and he just — stopped. It was a song he hadn't heard in fifteen years and hadn't thought about in longer. Back seat of somebody's car, summer, all of them singing too loud, a girl he'd been quietly in love with reaching over and turning it up. He remembered the specific blue of the dashboard lights. He remembered what she had smelled like. She had gotten married three years ago to somebody else, and he was happy for her, and this was still a different thing, a thing that could exist alongside the first thing without contradicting it. He stood in the aisle until the song ended.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/overwhelmed.txt

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+The baby was crying and the toddler had just spilled juice and the email that had come through on her phone was from her boss and she could see it was the "quick question" kind that never was. She had not slept in four hours two nights in a row. She stood in the kitchen with the paper towels in her hand and felt her capacity flatten, just go flat, like a tire with a slow leak. Everything was needed at once. She could not prioritize. She could not even choose which hand to use first. For a second she considered sitting down on the floor and she did not trust that she would get back up, so she didn't.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/panicked.txt

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+She couldn't find the kid. She had looked away for thirty seconds, maybe less, and now the spot where he had been was empty. The playground was full of other people's children. She scanned once, fast, and did not see him. Her body started doing a thing her body did — hot, tight, slightly disconnected — and she was already moving before her mind had caught up. She called his name too loud. A woman turned around. Her voice was not her normal voice. Every second that passed was physically expensive. When she finally saw him, under the slide, pulling the laces of his shoe, she could not for a moment tell if she was going to hug him or yell.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/paranoid.txt

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+He'd noticed the blue sedan three times in four days. First the grocery store, then again on the way back from his dentist, then parked two doors down when he pulled into his own driveway. Different license plates each time, which was arguably the point. He kept the phone on the kitchen counter now instead of carrying it. The new neighbors were "from Delaware" but neither of them had a Delaware accent. He'd started checking the basement window each night. He knew how it sounded. But sometimes the simplest explanation wasn't the correct one, and there were patterns he was the only person in a position to see.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/playful.txt

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+I gave the dog the squeaky pig and she went into her little whirl — the one where her whole body goes into it, back end swinging around and around, front end bowing down, squeak squeak squeak, a manic grin. I laughed and tossed her a second squeaky toy just to see what she'd do. She tried to get both in her mouth at once, failed magnificently, dropped one, picked it up, dropped the other, looked up at me with an expression that said WHAT HAS HAPPENED and I was laughing too hard to help. I lay down on the floor and she climbed on me, squeaking.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/proud.txt

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+I finished the patch at four in the morning and got up from the desk and walked once around the apartment before I sent it. Eight months on this bug. Eight months of wrong theories and wasted weekends and one colleague quietly betting me it was unfixable. And here it was — a six-line change, three of which were deleting code. I went back and read the diff one more time. Clean. Obvious in hindsight, the way the hard ones always are in hindsight. I sent it. Then I stood at the kitchen window for a minute with my arms crossed and let myself just have it.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/proud_of_another.txt

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+She watched her daughter on stage and she couldn't quite control her face. The solo had been at the end of the piece and her daughter had hit it — really hit it, the note that had been giving her trouble for six weeks — and then kept going into the run without bobbling, without flinching. In the audience her mother was dabbing her eyes without any pride in having dry ones. She clapped until her hands stung. When her daughter came out after the concert she hugged her and said "you did that, you did that, you did that," and her daughter was embarrassed and glowing at once, the way kids are when the thing they did was actually good.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/relieved.txt

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+The nurse came out and said everything had gone well. Simple as that. Everything had gone well. The surgeon was pleased. The recovery would be straightforward. She had been standing up and she sat back down in the waiting room chair and didn't trust her legs for a minute. Her shoulders, which she hadn't realized had been up near her ears for six hours, slowly came down. She laughed, once, at nothing in particular. She texted her sister. She kept reading the nurse's words in her head as if there were some trick to them, and there wasn't, and it took her a while to let it be that simple.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/rigorous.txt

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+The pull request had three approvals but she opened the diff one more time anyway, reading each function from the top. Not looking for bugs exactly — looking for *this shouldn't be here*. The kind of thing that's easy to scan past because it compiles and passes the tests and looks right. On the fourth file she slowed. There was a branch that handled an edge case with a magic constant. It worked, but she couldn't find the place where the constant came from, and it was subtle enough that none of the reviewers had questioned it. She left a comment asking where the number came from, because the answer mattered even if the code was correct.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/rushing.txt

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+The email was already half-written when the next meeting notification chimed. He skimmed the last few lines he'd typed, couldn't quite tell if they landed, hit send anyway. Opened the meeting. Half-listened while triaging the inbox with the other half of his attention. A colleague asked him a question and he answered too quickly and only later realized he'd answered the wrong question entirely. At 4pm, walking to the coffee machine, he realized he couldn't name a single thing he had actually completed that day. Everything had been touched. Nothing had been done. His shoulders were up somewhere near his ears.