I already said this to the person who most needs to hear it right now, but I'll say it again for the room in case anyone else needs to hear it, too:

Do not surround yourself with people who use you for entertainment to the detriment of your well-being.

Twitter, unfortunately, is built for exactly this. People can follow you for whatever reason they want, and egg you on (with very little effort or thought) with a like or retweet. You get a little serotonin hit, and it encourages you to continue. It's behaviorism 101.

But not all of those people have your best interests in mind. Once upon a time, I had a lot of followers, too. Some of them genuinely liked me. Others, it turned out, only hung around because I spoke up when something angered me, and they found that entertaining.

When I spoke up, it was because I thought something unjust was happening and it was the right thing to do. But some of the people following me didn't care about it in that way; they were just there for the fireworks.

So when I *didn't* provide that entertainment—when I was exhausted from fighting, or when I thought a conflict could be better resolved diplomatically or privately—they turned on me. They didn't care about me being right, they just wanted me to entertain them.

And many of them were the people who were most dedicated to liking and RTing everything I did. It made me think they liked *me*; it made me feel good, validated. But it wasn't about me at all, or what I cared about. It was about egging me on so I'd keep performing.

When you start to get a lot of attention, in this or any other venue, it can be hard or impossible to tell WHY you're getting that attention. To separate the people who give a shit about you from the people who do not. Their likes are all worth the same little serotonin hit.

Actual honest-to-god celebrities go through it, and people who have a few hundred followers on twitter go through it. We did not evolve to be able to deal with the attentions of hundreds of people, much less thousands or millions.

When you are surrounded with people smashing a little heart-shaped button any time you do anything, whether it's good or not-so-good, it can become hard to tell the difference, or care about the difference. What does it matter, if it gets you the same reaction?

Even the best, most kind-hearted person fucks up from time to time. And we all need people around us to call us on our shit. But they can be drowned out by all the yes-men.

Whether you're famous or "twitter famous", you cannot buy into your own hype, good or bad, because it's not about you; it's about the entertainment you provide. And that's so much easier said than done. Because we're all human, and we want to be loved.

Sometimes the yes-yes-yes, like-button-smashing, fan/follower-accumulating feels more like love than the people telling us we're wrong. That's the hardest thing to overcome, the addiction to that shallow like-button form of love that desensitizes us to the tough love.

But the people who care enough to tell you when you're wrong, to try and snap you out of that haze of superficial approval, are the ones who will still be there when you're no longer a popular form of entertainment.

I don't know if there's a way to make anyone understand this without finding it out for themselves. But I am almost positive that, if you are currently riding a wave like this and letting the superficial adulation dictate your behavior, one day you'll look back, and realize this.