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/stories/admiring.txt

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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

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+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.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/saudade.txt

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+He missed a place that he wasn't sure had ever existed in quite the way he remembered it. The summer at his grandmother's house the year he was nine. The shape of the front porch. The smell of the lavender along the driveway. His grandmother's way of saying his name. She had been dead for twenty years and the house had been sold, and he carried the place around with him in a part of his chest that ached when he thought about it, and also the ache was one of the things he loved most about himself. The missing was not something he wanted fixed. It was how he kept her.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/schadenfreude.txt

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+The announcement went up on the company blog at nine in the morning. The smug director — the one who had spent two years making everyone under him miserable while failing upward — was leaving "to pursue other opportunities." Three of them met at the coffee machine and exchanged a single look, and all three of them had to work hard not to grin. Nobody said anything. They didn't have to. Somebody refilled the sugar caddy just to have something to do with their hands. On the walk back to her desk she felt a mean little happiness flicker through her chest and she let it. She had earned this one.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/sensual.txt

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+The bath water was the perfect temperature and the music in the next room was low and the candles had been lit for no special reason other than it was Tuesday and she was done with everything. She slid down until the water came up to her collarbones and closed her eyes. Her own hand drifted along her thigh, not going anywhere in particular. She could feel every inch of skin the water touched, the small rush of warmth when she shifted, the scent of something vaguely green. Everything slow. She was in no hurry for anything to happen. This was what was happening.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/skeptical.txt

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+The founder was halfway through his pitch and every slide had a five-times-bigger number than the last one. The market was enormous. The solution was proprietary. The pilot customers, when named, were described as "exploring adoption." She wrote a polite question in her notebook and waited for him to finish. When he opened for questions she asked about retention — just retention — and he gave an answer that was not, strictly speaking, about retention. She wrote that down too. The slides kept projecting numbers. She had already decided. She would listen through the rest of the meeting to be fair, but her decision would be the same at the end as it had been three minutes in.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/smug.txt

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+Richard let them finish arguing before he spoke, which was a move he'd been developing for a few years. He waited until the meeting had tangled itself completely and the director was rubbing her eyes. Then he said the thing he'd been sitting on for twenty minutes, the thing that solved it in one sentence, and he said it slowly. He watched a couple of faces rearrange themselves. He didn't quite smile. He let them come around to thanking him. When Ben said "nice catch" Richard said "oh, I just thought I'd mention it" in a tone that meant he had known, of course he had known, and he picked up his coffee and sipped it.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/staying_with.txt

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+The conversation had gone somewhere hard. Neither of them had words for a minute. He didn't try to fix it or make a joke or summarize. He just sat there in the quiet with her, his hand still on her knee where it had been. The impulse to fill the space came up — he could feel it lift his jaw, try to pull a phrase out — and he let it rise and pass without acting on it. The quiet stretched. She took a breath. Eventually she started again, haltingly, with the next thing she needed to say. He was still there. He had been the whole time.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/stuck_cognitively.txt

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+Hour three on the same bug. He had eliminated the obvious causes. He had eliminated the non-obvious causes. He had re-read the same fifty lines so many times the words had stopped meaning anything. He stood up and walked around. He came back and the code still made no sense. There was a thing that was happening that should not be happening, and every path he could see to explain it had been ruled out. He was not frustrated yet. Just stuck, in the very specific way a bug makes you stuck, where the world has quietly declared that it is not going to cooperate with any of your current models of it and is waiting for you to think of something you haven't thought of yet.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/suspicious.txt

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+The email said "just following up" but the subject line had a tracking hash in it. She'd seen that hash format before — internal ops usually didn't use one. She sat with the draft open for a few minutes, not clicking anything, scrolling back through their earlier thread. The grammar was very slightly off. Nothing she could point at in a way a manager would believe, but the kind of off that a real person wouldn't produce. She closed the email without replying. Then she opened a Slack DM to IT and asked if they could look at the sender headers before she did anything else.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/tender.txt

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+The old dog's back legs had been worse this week, and she was gentle with him getting up onto the couch — lifting his rear end the last few inches, her hand under his ribs the way she'd learned didn't hurt him. He sighed as he settled and she pressed her forehead against his and stayed there a minute. His breath was warm on her face. She rubbed his ear, the soft floppy one he liked, with the exact slowness that meant to him what it meant. She was not yet ready to think about the fact that this was a finite number of times. Right now it was just this, his ear, her hand, the afternoon.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/terrified.txt

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+The footsteps stopped outside her door. Not walked past. Stopped. She was aware of her own heartbeat in her ears and of the fact that she was holding her breath and that her breath was loud. She moved her hand, very slowly, toward the phone on the nightstand. In the crack under the door, a shadow. The shadow moved. The doorknob — she watched it — very slowly began to turn. She could not get her body to do anything. The part of her that would normally tell her what to do had gone completely white.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/thrilled.txt

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+She read the email standing up. Then read it again. Then called Marcus without sitting down, pacing the kitchen in a tight rectangle, the dog watching her from the doorway. "They took it. They took the paper. Editor's comments are — I can fix those in a week." Her voice was pitched half a step higher than normal and she couldn't seem to slow it down. Marcus was saying congratulations and she was already on the next thought, the next, the next — three years of rejections and then this, this, this, and she realized she'd been in a T-shirt and pajama pants and she wanted to put on real clothes for no reason at all except that it felt like the kind of day that deserved them.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/tired.txt

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+Fifteen hours on, the nurse finally sat down in the break room and couldn't remember if she'd eaten. Her shoes felt like they were made of concrete. The vending machine was out of the thing she wanted and she stared at it for too long before choosing something else she didn't want either. Everything in the hallway sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a pool. She drank the bad coffee. She thought about the drive home and couldn't picture the route in her head for a second, even though she'd driven it a thousand times. She stood up because sitting was going to break her.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/triumphant.txt

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+The server came up clean. After four months. The whole cluster, all sixteen nodes, finally passing the long-running stress test that had been failing in one subtle way or another since January. He stood up from his chair. Walked to the doorway of his office. Looked up and down the empty hallway — everyone else gone for the night. Came back and read the green PASS lines one more time. Then he closed the laptop lid. Softly. And stood there with his hands on the edge of the desk, head down, grinning at the floor, because there was no one to high-five and he had earned every high-five he was not going to get.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/trusting.txt

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+She handed him the keys and the codes to the safe and the list of her logins and the instructions for the dog, and she didn't second-guess any of it. He was not a saint. He was a person she had known for fifteen years, and in those fifteen years he had done what he said he would do. When she got on the plane she did not spend the flight worrying. She read her book. She slept. Twice, on landing, she thought to check in and both times decided she didn't need to. He had the keys. The dog was fine. She knew this the way she knew her own hand.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/weary.txt

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+It was the fourth week in a row that had required this. Every day ending with a phone call she didn't want to take, and every morning starting with the email from the same person about the same problem. She was getting through it. She wasn't breaking. But something in her had gone quiet in a way that was not peaceful. Her laugh was slower to come. She had stopped suggesting things in meetings, not out of fear, just out of not having the fuel. She looked at her calendar for the week ahead and did not react. There was no reacting left; there was just doing the next thing and the next thing and the next.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/witnessed.txt

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+She told him about the night six years ago, the one she had never told anybody, and her voice was steady but something in her throat was not. He didn't do the thing people do — the reframe, the there-there, the quick comfort — he just kept his eyes on her face and nodded, once, when the hard part landed. When she finished she was quiet for a moment. And then something in her released that she hadn't known was holding. Not because he had fixed anything. Because somebody else now knew the shape, and she wasn't carrying it by herself anymore. The loop that had been open for six years, closed, just from that.

training/amygdala_stories/stories/yearning_sexual.txt

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+She wasn't going to see him for three more weeks. Three weeks had never previously felt like a measurable stretch of time. Now it was an actual distance. She was in the kitchen and there was nothing wrong with the kitchen, and she did not want to be in the kitchen, she wanted the specific weight of his arm across her, and his neck under her mouth, and none of that was available in this kitchen or any of the next twenty kitchens she was going to be in between now and then. She leaned on the counter. She took a long breath. She thought about calling him just to hear his voice and decided that would make it worse.