Rambling...
I seriously don't know what to do.
When I was in high school, I had a nice little group of friends, built up along a series of various aquaintances; we actually all went to four different high schools, and it was the connections of various folks that brought us together. Our little group had a lot of laughs together, and made those years memorable.
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But I think that certain situations for people can, well, hurt them, first of all, and then make them react in ways that are unlike their "normal" selves, but instead be the sort of thing where you lash out and then look back and say "why did I SAY that shit? I didn't really mean it." And if that becomes a regular enough condition, people start getting confuzzled as to which part of them is the more normal part--the pissed-off, sent-spinning, lashing-out part or the not-stressed part. Because let's be honest, RI can be a fucking stressful place--even the much-deplored tournament drama can still cause genuine stress in people. This is something that gets into how we communicate with others on the internet and trolling and misunderstandings and blah-blah-blah and I'm not going to splutter on about it, but I do find it reasonable, in one sense, to retreat from a place that's causing you genuine stress if it's otherwise optional for you to go there.
The thing is, regular, consistent patterns of stress are... well, I'm not going to say we don't stress out our friends either, but we generally don't mean to. But if an environment I enter has people regularly stressing me out, and they don't respond to my entreaties to not do that anymore, then at the very least it might appear that they do indeed intend to cause you stress. And those sorts of people aren't really people I'd call friends--they're something closer to bullies or enemies or something.
But the other thing is, of course, WHY is that the case? Because most people in RI are generally accepting of anybody that's not totally lame, and you can usually even make some pretty fast friends there. So for people that you used to call friends, suddenly and frustratingly becoming enemies, first of all, probably indicates that something went painfully wrong somewhere--some TIME long before the state where coming to RI is itself a poisonous experience. So even though your mind can frame the patterns of stress into a state where it feels like everyone in RI hates your guts, that wasn't the case and nine times out of ten probably isn't the case even now. When you come to that realization, you can basically either accept the fact that RI, in your mind if nowhere else, is just somewhere you don't want to be anymore, that the switch has been pressed too far for you to ever make amends with any of these people...
...you can try to trace things back to where it went wrong in the first place and try to rebuild the bridge...
...or you can go forward with chilling at RI despite the stress, because there are people there you actually enjoy being around, and you won't let stress keep you away from those people. (and yes, technically that's possible with AIM as well, but there may be something a bit more fulfilling about sticking it to the man, in a manner of speaking.)
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I also believe stress is caused 99.9% by ourselves. Like you said in your second comment, your stress was caused because you thought everyone hated you, which is totally not the case then or now. It's all about perception.
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But too often, people use that line or its kin to shift responsibility for their own bad attitudes away from themselves. I especially hate when somebody says "It's just a bad environment."
Sudan after dusk is a bad environment. RI is an IRC channel where, at most, you may get into a fight over how we do roleplaying - something I've always thought could easily be avoided with at least a temporary Control->Ignore.
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Seriously, all my stress is mostly caused by myself and only a very small portion of it is outside forces.
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