A wise friend said something to me the other day that's been really helping me, so I offer it to you in case it helps you. It's basically this: When you're alone as much as some of us are right now, you sometimes just want casual company. (1/)

And in the absence of it, it's extremely easy to fire up Twitter (or whatever) just for the chatter. And then, as she put it, it starts to feel like Twitter is the whole world. (2/)

In my case, this means that it often feels like the whole world is ... very hostile. Not necessarily to me personally, just generally. Because for a lot of people, it's not the whole world. It's just where they dump out their stress buckets. (3/)

So because I'm lonely, I go find a whole world made up of stress buckets. And when people are mad at me, obviously the effects of that are really exaggerated. (4/)

But more than people being mad, it's when people are *disappointed*, or I feel like maybe I said a wrong thing or drew a wrong conclusion or liked a bad show or didn't like a good movie, it feels enormous, and it drives me right into a ditch. (5/)

In conclusion, I've decided to talk on the phone more. (/fin)