And I learned something valuable about my susceptibility to certain well-worn but effective sales tactics when the seller has something I want to buy.
Although I know that depression is not something you can catch from another person, like chickenpox, I fear that my susceptibility will somehow "rub off" on my daughter — that she might pattern her responses to life's inevitable difficulties after my own.
Specifically, I have for several years been thinking about writing, and while there are people who are able to combine serious writing with full-time jobs, my susceptibility to distraction when faced with a blank screen makes that impossible.
It was precisely in the sounding of the names of the country's distant places, in its spaciousness, in the dialects and the landscapes that were at once so American yet so unlike my own that a youngster with my susceptibilities found the most potent lyrical appeal.
It caught my attention because I'm well aware of my own susceptibility to quite severe mood swings in the days before my period.
My own susceptibility to this malady became all too apparent when I began to investigate its diagnostic ancestry.
I took these episodes for what they clearly were: welcome reminders of my boundless susceptibility to suggestion, which, as any good hypnotist will tell you, is just another term for intelligence.
I also fear my own susceptibility to an e-mail-checking addiction, like the character Ryan on a recent episode of "The Office," who panicked when his phone was taken away during a bar trivia game.
One patient, Helene Fleckney, 43, from Shenley in Hertfordshire, said: "A history of heart disease and diabetes runs in my family, so I knew I had to take action with my weight gain to lower my risk of susceptibility, as well as improving my confidence.
The Prison Service, quite rightly, makes great efforts to protect staff from my sort of susceptibility and I still have, like a moral editor, in the back of my head the course I did early on about "prison craft".
My ex-husband, a boomer, has abstained from alcohol use for many years and has again lost control, but I worry about my children's susceptibility to this addiction.
