Land of Strife and Ash

I think the reason that bad interactions with strangers or acquaintances feel so acutely painful to me is that I consider the version of me that exists in someone else's brain to be basically as real and true (maybe even moreso?) as the version that exists in my own brain (aka what a normal person would call my actual self). And all of these "me's" are part of some greater, hyperdimensional gestalt Me, the ultimate self in Homestuck terms.

And when someone gets an impression of me as rude or stupid or cruel or annoying or evil, that creates a splinter of me that is all of those things. And that hurts Me, which hurts me. So my instinct is to try to rectify that, to create a better impression, to change the traits of that splinter by trying to repair the "relationship," with that person, even (or especially!) if no such relationship exists. Which generally doesn't go well.