What the reading costs you

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill.

The evenings. Four hours on a two-line email. An evening on a quiet dinner. An hour on a cheerful reply. Over a year that's weeks, spent inside a guess.

The anxiety. A person who lives at the centre of everyone else's behaviour lives in a world where every mood is a possible verdict on them, and that's a frightening world to live in, and the fear doesn't switch off when the reading turns out to be wrong, because there's another mood tomorrow.

The relationship. Downey and Feldman's rejection-sensitive people and their partners were both less satisfied, and the researchers traced part of that to what the reading produced, the jealousy, the hostility, the reduced support. A partner who's met the cool, hurt version of you a hundred times, on evenings when they were only tired, has a hundred data points about what it's like to be tired near you.

The work. Thursday's meeting arrives with a version of you in it that's been rehearsing a defence for two days. The manager, who'd meant a normal catch-up, meets a person braced for a verdict, and wonders what's wrong.

The friendships. The friend who took a day to reply, and got, in return, a slightly cooler you for a week, without knowing why.

The version of them you build. Every reading that goes unchecked becomes part of your picture of the other person. Your manager, in your picture, is someone who withholds and disapproves. Your partner is someone who punishes with silence. Neither picture is drawn from anything they did. Both are drawn from readings, and you'll act toward the picture, and they'll feel it, and it'll come back to you as coolness, and you'll read that too.

The sleep, on the nights the reading arrives late. A message at ten, read as cool, is a message that's still being read at one, and the morning after is spent tired as well as wary. And the body's cost of living braced, which is the cost of any habit that treats ordinary days as threatening, and which shows up as a tension that's hard to locate because it isn't about anything in particular. It's about everyone.

And the plain cost of being wrong, over and over, about the people you know best, and never finding out, because the evening ends and the next day they're fine.