Feeling things is good, since I usually don't. Don't know if it feels good.

Maybe you should take a while to think about whether you like it before I do the other one.

Okay. I'm pretty tired again, maybe I'll just lie down for a bit?

...That's faster than the coffee thing seemed to wear off last time, Bella observes, but sure, lie down if you like.

I sort of am in the habit of lying down when overwhelmed even if it's not exactly tired. I'm sorry.

You don't have to be sorry, it's all right.

But I said I was tired and that wasn't really it.

That's okay. You're not in particularly good practice right now naming your feelings and when it's really important that I know what they are in that much detail I'll ask to read them.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

About twenty minutes later, she stirs. All right, we can try the other one now.

Thank you. I might wait a bit to check it; I get nervous and then all I think about is how I'm so bad at feeling things - and how is anyone bad at feeling things - that I'll mess it up.

Lots of people are bad at feeling things. Sometimes someone presents with a condition sort of like yours and it turns out they've been feeling things all along and just can't tell. You can wait as long as you like before you test it out.

Maybe where you're from. Here everyone seems quite good at it.

It does seem like things people get subtle arts help with are less common in your species, she acknowledges, unless everyone's just very good at hiding it and bad at diagnosing it and you're just the first one to run out of the ability to pretend.

I hope that's not true.

Me too. But I'm still not inclined to chalk it up to you being uniquely bad at anything. You have the resources you have, mental ones as well as all the other kinds, and this is as far as they got you, so I'm here to help.

I have everything and can't seem to so much as get out of bed.

If there's a - a jug of water and you can't twist the cap off because your hands shake too much you don't really have the water. If there's a book and you can't read the language you don't really have the information. And if there's a - a science fantasy paradise and you can't even sit up, it's not very paradisaical for you.

She smiles. Science fantasy?

In my world the universe gets angry and contrary if you try to figure out how it works in too much detail - doing iterated experiments is dangerous and in the best case will just make whatever you were looking at change just to spite you. There's at least one part of the world that doesn't have a down anymore because someone was dropping things and measuring how fast they fell in too much detail.

She giggles. Then she looks startled at herself. Really? How do you get better at things?

Bella smiles. It's okay to notice things just in the course of going about your life. It's okay to copy what other people are doing, and they may have noticed different things or tried something that works better on their first, safe try. It's okay to practice at a thing and improve at the skills involved. People can invent stuff and get really good at making stuff and the things that are useful spread, and we have a lot of things for quality of life that haven't been invented here yet. Just no experiments.

But you knew that other worlds allowed it?