None of it was mean — all of it was fair, honestly. But that wall of "consider…" and "why not…" hit me like a personal report card. Took me an evening to reframe it: the reviewer spent an hour of their time making my thing better, which is basically a gift.
Still, the sting was real. How do you stop tying your self-worth to a diff?
Forty comments on a PR usually means someone cared enough to teach, not that you failed, even if it absolutely doesn't feel that way in the moment. Try reading them as a batch the next morning instead of one by one in real time. The sting fades and it turns into a genuinely useful learning doc.
Been there with the 40-comment PR that felt like a personal attack. A senior reframed it for me: review comments are a conversation, not a verdict, and a PR with zero comments usually just means nobody looked closely. The volume is attention, not judgment. Doesn't kill the sting fully but it helps.
