People are like onions

Typical social interaction comes with essentially rhetorical questions. We, in fact, expect an answer to "How are you doing?" or "How has your week been?", but I think the main purpose of these questions is to let us start a conversation to get to our real question or topic of discussion. However, the answer to these questions IS my topic of discussion.
How I'm doing is tied heavily to how my week has been. It's not exactly been emotional, because that sounds too lachrymose, but it has certainly been emotion-ful.
I woke Sunday morning in my parents' basement (no, they didn't kidnap me) with the carpet flooded. That emotion is called stress. Possible panic. It meant that on Monday, when I attended one of my best friend's wedding, I hadn't showered in two days because we had to turn our water off. Fortunately someone invented wet wipes and perfume a while ago.
The wedding itself was sheer happiness. Imagine the true friendship where their happiness brings you happiness. That's how it is. Sharon was beaming, wearing a grin not because of wedding pictures, but because her soul was pulling her mouth and eyes upward. So I was delighted. Being with her and Alyssa once again was uplifting, gravity-defying [I'm listening to Wicked right now], and outstanding.

Then I came down. Literally actually, since I had to fly to a lower latitude and altitude to go back to work. I came back to once again be the nurse of a patient who had been in our hospital for 5 months. I had a dream weeks ago that he was giving up on life, and I was crying out to not give up yet. Well, the day before I left for the wedding, his will to keep fighting had died, and I had expected his body to have followed suit during my absence. I tried to get him as comfortable as I could for two more days after my return, as he shut down more and more; and then, during the night, he died. I felt rather...still. It took me 30 hours to get to the crying point. During that period, I worried that I had become callous to death. I don't want to be calloused to anything except my guitar strings. I think sensitivity brings more empathy, and empathy is what makes my job so rewarding. So when I finally cried, I was glad. Strangely.

That brings me to Sunday, when another one of my best friends was humble enough, brave enough, and eloquent enough to share his struggles with same-gender-attraction to my church congregation. He had told me that he was gay (in the sense of orientation, not of behavior) at the beginning of our friendship, and wanted me to be there in the congregation to support him. This took some desperate begging on my part, because I was actually scheduled to work. I asked several co-workers to please switch with me so that I could support my gay friend come out to my ward congregation. Perhaps the vocabulary choice was poor, because one of my co-workers said she didn't want me to support him. I wish she had come as well. His talk was fantastic--about how his love for Christ has given him the strength to sacrifice very worthy dreams of family and companionship because he wants to remain true to his beliefs. Really, very beautiful expression of his journey to become nearer to God.

It is fascinating to me that we can hold so many emotions, sometimes contradictory, simultaneously. Does the emotion at the surface describe how we feel, or is it the one at the deepest level that truly reflects our response to life? That question, though not rhetorical, is something worse: philosophical.