One loud critic feels like a crowd. Count them. It’s often just one.

A single persistent voice can impersonate a crowd. Because it repeats, and because you replay it afterwards for days, the one person who said the cruel thing ends up sounding like a room full of people who agree with them. The multiplication happens in your head, not in the world.

So count, on actual fingers. How many people said it, how many said nothing, how many have gone out of their way to say the opposite. One against thirty is a very different situation from the one you were carrying around, and it takes about ten seconds to establish which you are in.