How you come into a room:

Loudly, and something is happening within four minutes.Quietly, reading everybody, knowing who is not all right.Calmly, and the room settles very slightly.Talking already, mid-thought, about something odd.

What you do with anger:

Say it, now, at volume, and be over it by the evening.Go quiet, feel all of it, and remember it for years.Sit on it until it is useful, then do something with it.Get sharp and funny, and win the exchange.

Your relationship with plans:

Start first, plan later, apologise never.Go where the day goes. It usually knows.Have one. Follow it. Enjoy that it worked.Make nine, commit to none, keep everything open.

Somebody is falling apart in front of you:

Get furious at whatever caused it.Feel it with them, so they are not in it alone.Make tea, sit down, stay as long as it takes.Ask the question that gets them out of the spiral.

Pick a landscape:

Desert at noon, heat coming up off the ground.A coast in bad weather, the sea getting on with it.Deep woods, old trees, moss over everything.A ridge above the cloud, the whole valley underneath.

What people find difficult about you:

You go from nought to furious and back with no warning.You withdraw, and nobody can tell what they did.You will not be moved, including when you are wrong.You are somewhere else, even while you are talking.

How you make a decision you cannot undo:

On instinct, fast, and you refuse to look back at it.Slowly, by how it sits in your body over about a week.By what is actually sustainable. Out loud. On paper.From six directions, and then more or less a coin toss.

What you need in order to be all right:

Something to want. Anything. Just something.Somebody who knows the whole thing and stayed anyway.A place that is yours, and a routine nobody interrupts.Room. Nobody asking where you are.

The compliment that would land:

"Nothing was happening until you walked in.""You understood it before I had explained it.""Everything holds when you are the one holding it.""You made me see the whole thing differently."

Pick a way to spend real money:

Something impulsive that you will defend for years.Somewhere with water, and no plan for being there.Something for the house, that will outlast you.Books, courses, a flight. Things that open something.

Your worst habit:

Burning a bridge for the satisfaction of the flames.Absorbing so much of somebody that you lose your own edges.Refusing to change a thing that stopped working ages ago.Talking about it beautifully instead of doing any of it.

Twenty years on, the thing you would want said:

"Nothing near them ever stayed the same.""They knew people all the way down.""Everything they built is still standing.""They changed how we thought about it."