I’ve often been called cold or unemotional, kind of a female Spock. I tend to analyze every situation to death, and I’m very slow to act, the opposite of impulsive. So other people perceived me in my childhood to be strangely mature. One of my nicknames in my early teens was “mature Mette,” because I was much less interested in dating and didn’t particularly like romantic movies. I didn’t ever go through a “boy crazy phase” and I remember when I first saw the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” I walked out of it because I considered it below my moral standards.
The truth is, I was not “mature.” My experience of feelings is one of the areas in which I may be immature, though maybe it’s just plain different. It’s not that I have no emotions, even though they rarely show on my face. It’s that my emotions show in different ways. In fact, I often think that I feel emotions more strongly than other people. They are so overwhelming, and it seems to me that this is one of the reasons they don’t show on my face. They are just so far down in the depths, they don’t rise to the surface. I’m so busy feeling them that the social aspect of showing them doesn’t happen.
When I am happy, I am very, very happy. Sometimes it feels impossible for me to feel any other emotion but tha tone. I remember in a religious setting that sometimes I would get praise for my extreme happiness, and of…
