Age teaches you how many things once called permanent were simply intense.

Intensity feels like permanence from the inside. The certainty that this love, this crisis, this despair will define the rest of your life comes from the strength of the feeling rather than from any knowledge of the future. Then a decade passes and you can barely reconstruct the state you were in, which is disorienting and also enormously reassuring.

When you are in something that feels permanent, hold the feeling and doubt the timeline. Write down what you believe about how long this will last, and read it in a year. This does not make the present less real. It just gives you a little room to breathe inside it.