Unhealthy attachment

I had to turn my back on Twitter yesterday, for as long as I can take it, because it was proving to be an unhealthy part of my life again.

All told, I really don't have that many friends here. I really only know a small handful of people well. The rest are what I would consider acquaintances. They are friendly to me and I like them, but they really don't care if  I live or die, or at least wouldn't notice for awhile. I tend to become too attached to people, especially if I feel some sort of kinship with them. When it becomes clear to me that it is not mutual, my self-esteem gets squashed. That has happened more than once recently, and I don't think I can handle any more of that right now.

I'm an inherently social person. I need that personal interaction, and before all this social media, I actually had more of that than I do now. It's easy to feel like you know someone based on their tweets, particularly if you interact with them a lot. However, realistically, this is a delusion. You can't know someone based on an online personality. Still, I get caught in that trap of thinking that someone cares about me as much as I do them. I invest a lot of time and effort in what I believe is a genuine friendship, and then they disappear or stop talking to me. I'm sure for many people, this seems trivial, and I would argue that those people have a much larger support network, and social media is just a small component of that network. Still feeling like a newbie to town, mine is pretty limited, and, I'm realizing, woefully inadequate.