#86: Rejection sensitivity.

N. wasn’t a particularly close friend, and we didn’t have a falling out per se. The friendship just fizzled, until eventually he decided to unfollow me on Twitter, to put a final nail in a slow process of undoing.

Rationally, I know there was no reason for him to respond to a text asking for closure. Our friendship was brief, just over a year, and for the last six months, not much of a friendship at all. It amounted to a mostly barren Signal thread, with the odd message here or there about astrology, or a podcast neither one of us listened to completion.

Still, I have put an inordinate amount of time into thinking about what happened. I know I have. I’ve tweeted about it several times; I shared the anecdote with a couple of friends over lunch; I am writing this essay now.

The number of people I speak to on any given timescale far exceeds Dunbar’s number, and if I took every instance of rejection personally, I would be a very depressed person. I have lost friends, acquaintances, and people who exist in the liminal space between the two for all sorts of reasons: I’m too flaky, they don’t like what I write here or on Twitter, my real or imagined allegiances with people they’ve decided are their enemies, I don’t sufficiently respect their otherkin identity, they don’t sufficiently respect my professional identity.

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