The loneliest nights of being young feel permanent. They almost never are.

A bad night makes a convincing case for being permanent. Part of that is how time feels when you are young, where a fortnight is long, so a hard stretch reads as the shape of your whole life rather than a season. The feeling is real and the forecast it offers is not. Almost everybody who has had those nights is somewhere else now.

When one arrives, lower the aim: get to tomorrow, not to a solution. Something warm, something to watch, somebody to message if you can manage it. If the nights are stacking up rather than passing, tell one adult you trust, because that load is worth sharing.