Okay, it’s confession time!

(Who doesn’t love confession time?)

Actually, it’s even better than confession time.  It’s time for a series of confessions:

1) Like many Americans, I am addicted to twitter.

2) Like many twitter users, I claim not to care how many people follow me.

3) Like many twitter users who claim not to how many people follow me, I very much care how many people follow me.

4) That I take rejection personally shouldn’t come as a big shock because most people do.  I take no shame in that nor do I feel like I should pretend like I don’t feel that I’m worth knowing.  However, what’s odd is that I actually find myself more offended when I’m rejected online than when I’m rejected in the real world (for lack of a better term).

Why is this?

Why is it that I can usually recover from real-life rejection in a day or two yet, if someone unfollows me on twitter, I’ll can carry a grudge against them for 1 year, 6 months, and counting?

I think it’s because, in real life, we can make up excuses for the rejection.  We can say, “I bet he has a girlfriend,” or “Maybe he just got really busy at work.”  We can say, “Maybe he lost my number,” or “Maybe he’s lying in a ditch dead somewhere.”  And deep down, we know that chances are, he’s alive, single, unemployed. and highly organized.  But what’s important is that we still know he might be dead.

Whereas, if you get rejected on twitter, it’s because someone specifically went to your homepage and clicked unfollow.  It takes more than one step to reject someone on twitter. 

Morbid as it may be to acknowledge, the dead can continue to follow you on twitter without you ever realizing that there’s no longer anybody around to read what you’re writing. 

Rejection may hurt but being unfollowed — now that’s pain.