Not remotely. It's just the part that seemed most prudent to focus on.

My comments about speaking to a therapist were entirely sincere. The fact that I didn't just choose to respond further when you bristled at them is because they were sincere. I'm not here to belittle you or try to get in a fight with you. And you're right, I can't psychoanalyze a stranger over the internet, which is why I'm not trying to. Just asking you to speak to someone professional who can. As the saying goes, "I don't have to be a helicopter pilot to see one in a tree and figure out that someone fucked up." You're displaying very obvious signs that you need some kind of help, but saying any more than that would definitely be stepping out of my lane.

I boiled down the rest of your response to one point because that one point crystalises my disagreement... Or, to be more specific, I think it crystallizes where you misread my previous remarks.

Let's clarify the context here. This what I previously responded to:

"The part of me that is pessimistic (that part seems to be growing these days…) thinks they would just hang up on you and if you call them back enough times they’ll call the police on you to report you for harassment."

When I pointed out that this was unhealthy behaviour, you didn't actually engage on that point at all. Instead you built a strawman. Your reply;

"The truth is, we obviously don’t know for sure what will happen, but it’s also not likely to be surprising if it doesn’t go our way. It’s the most likely outcome and pretending otherwise is disingenuous. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight, though."

...is framed as if I had made some broad statement about the likelihood of success of the entire endeavour. I didn't. I responded specifically to your suggestion that an MP would quite literally call the cops on you just for demanding to speak to them.

So if we're going to bandy about accusations of arguing in bad faith, I could just as easily choose to point to this as an example of doing the same.

What I did instead, rather than throwing around accusations, was choose to focus the discussion back down to the most pertinent point. I chose that question because it serves three purposes simultaneously;

• If you were arguing in bad faith, it would illustrate the failings in your argument.
• If you were unintentionally misreading my point, it would clarify the difference between our arguments.
• The question itself was genuine; you might have answered "Yes", in which case I would operating from a false assumption, and you would have corrected me in that.

But you chose instead to take it as an attack. That's... Telling, to say the least.

Anyway, I'll sign off of the conversation here. It's clear from your responses thus far that either by intention, or because you cannot help yourself, anything I say is just going to continue to get twisted up into either another attack on you, or another reason to feel down.

I hope the rest of your week gets better. I do mean that sincerely.