QUOTE : As someone who gets teary-eyed at rom-coms, analyzes my feelings about my feelings, and shows off my cuts and bruises like a six-year-old, I naturally find stoicism absurd. But the truth is that C. really is good at self-soothing, both physically and emotionally, and if I had been able to leave her in peace for twenty minutes that day on the trail, the whole thing would have blown over like the wispy little cirrus clouds overhead. But I could not, so I goaded her into talking to me, whereupon I learned that what she had heard, in “just out hiking for the day” was dismissiveness—an implication that the activity we were engaged in was a pale version of what I really wanted to be doing.