For the two weeks that we were on vacation, my friend Parnika and I had an exhausting nighttime routine. Right before we went to sleep, I would turn to her with a pout and declare, “He hates me.” Sitting up with a sigh, she would list all the logical reasons why the man I liked did not, in fact, hate me.
For one, he had just called me a few hours ago, and we’d been all day. Some days, he’d informed me he would be busy with work; on other nights, he’d fallen asleep early. Even if, three hours ago, he had told me he liked me, I would find myself convinced his feelings had since changed.
Surely he loathed me by now; maybe he’d realised I was annoyingly clingy or found out I was secretly a terrible person. No matter how irrational my thoughts were, I was convinced they were true. Unbeknownst to me, there was a term for the insecurity I was feeling.
Emotional impermanence, as a told me a few days later, is when “you don’t believe that the feelings of others still exist when you’re not with them or talking to them. You don’t trust that people still care for you even when they’re not around or actively giving you affection.” The words made me gasp.
Only recently, I’d realised that I struggled with the idea that people missed me: every time someone said they did, I’d find myself confused, thinking, “Surely not?”. In my mind, my loved ones only thought about me if I was with them, despite the fact that I found myself missing them frequently. In all my r.