Whatever we face - disease, isolation, death or some other crisis - there can be a temptation to burry our emotions to avoid feeling the discomfort in the moment. We can hide these feelings from our awareness, but not from our subconscious. Emotions, I learned, that encode themselves in the brain's limbic system, where motivation, long- term memory reside. They "resurface when triggered by a simple memory or a new event".

It takes more energy to suppress and control emotions than to feel them in the moment and share them openly.