Too hard to admit, too true to deny

Here's a quote from a book I am reading:

'It's hard to accept that other people's lives are as full and real and now as yours. You look at someone and sort of think, against your intellectual knowing better, that they have a less complex life, they're able to flit about, their lives aren't clogged with the same kind of pressing deadlines, they don't really have  cousins like you have cousins, they are free tonight, of course they are free, or of they have plans they can easily break then to be with you, Our live just feel so impossibly big to us; we're breathing versions of that Saul Steinburg poster, where New York is in the foreground, prominent and massive and drawn in colored-pencil details, and the others states and Asia and Africa are tiny lumps fading into the horizon.

This egocentric/inner bigness is precisely why people leave their phone number so quickly on other people's answering machines; they've said the number so many times that they think everyone else in the world is as familiar with it as they are. The number has become synonymous with their identity: Surely my phone number is as prominent in your brain as it is in mine.'

Amy Krouse Rosenthal

It might have exaggerated, but somehow it's true.