But what I really felt was something between panic and penitence. I was certain the end of us was coming, that I had caused it. I was sorry for that. But, again, I was not ready to accept the inevitable. At the first sign of disaster—the chorus of barking dogs, the glass of water shuddering on the table—we scream until the silence is tolerable. We cannot prevent what happens next, but we can forestall feeling the full force of it. We can distract ourselves from the terror with the awful sound of our own voices.

For years, from my fear, I distracted myself by reading studies about orphans. Those studies provided strange comfort. Emotions were reduced to cold science. I reduced myself into them. It was a different kind of denial. Through the studies, I learned that children raised in orphanages often reach out their arms to be picked up, but as soon as they get what they seem to want, they kick and push and wriggle away. Then, once they have escaped, they throw themselves on the floor in utter despair and demand to be picked up again. The first time I read about that phenomenon, I laughed out loud. The story of my life, I thought. Then I curled up on the carpet, closed my eyes, and told myself that reading the studies was enough, that they contained all I needed to know. Into my own soul, I reassured myself, I needn’t go deep.

Interestingly, one of its core postulates is that the essential sociality of us all, or the universal human impulse to relate to others. In so far as we are relationship-seeking beings, then, what is the connective tissue that actually binds people together, that gives effect to this relational striving? In contrast to the popular belief that knowledge precedes action, I argue that emotions are what prompt and sustain human interactions - and not emotions in the conventional sense, of private feeling states stored inside our heads, each with its own unique biochemical correlate. I regard emotions, instead, as intersubjective phenomena that can be said to exist between people. How else does one explain being moved by a piece of music, a spellbinding movie or a superb novel, if not that some mysterious element - an emotion - has connected to the heart of the composer, the director or the author to the heart of the listener, the watcher or the reader?

There is something tragic about such noble suffering, that the only way around trauma is through it. This is why the word character - etymologically speaking - is about being etched, marked or carved with lines, as opposed to being free of all blemishes. Musing about the workings of psychoanalysis, the famed British analyst Wilfred Bion described once how “if there aren’t two anxious people in the room, the two being both the therapist and the patient, then there is not much point in turning up to find out what you already know.

My trip to Egypt and the book that emerged from it now seem to me an embodiment of my own struggle to clarify, to release from anxiety the narrator who could serve the situation and find the story—a thing I was not then able to do.

I’d always thought I was sort of a brazen person, but this issue with hyperventilating made me realize a part of me was, unexpectedly, high strung. I had no idea how nervous I got at the start of a race. But it turns out I really was tense, just like everybody else. It doesn’t matter how old I get, but as long as I continue to live I’ll always discover something new about myself. No matter how long you stand there examining yourself naked before a mirror, you’ll never see reflected what’s inside.