I’ve come to learn a lot about myself recently, especially this past year, and with that have come a lot of official diagnoses for things that have since helped me connect with myself on profoundly new levels. For starters, I’ve recently been diagnosed as Autistic, with ADHD, and complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Knowing this has allowed me the opportunity to better understand and process my thoughts, feelings, anxieties, fears, reactions, and, most importantly, my communication and how I interact with my partners and close friends. It’s something I’ve never been able to do before and has fast become a central priority of mine.
As I continue to explore all of this in therapy and through self-reflection, I also find myself continuously learning new stuff about myself that I had previously not realized were actually “things”. Take Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, the extreme emotional sensitivity and anxiety to perceived or experienced rejection, for example. While I haven’t been formerly diagnosed, yet, given that my experiences and symptoms align with it, and that RSD is such a common part of ADHD, it’s just what I’m going with as part of my current therapy and treatment.
As somebody who processes best by writing it out, that’s what I want to do here! But this is going to be a big one, so, I’m splitting it into to parts. Part Two, which I’ll post later in the week, will be more about how I try to cope with and navigate RSD while this post will give the historical experiences and framing of what and how I experience it in general.
My RSD Was Exacerbated by Abuse, and It Has Become a Core Part of Who I Am Now
For most of my life I’ve felt like I was bad at everything. Bad at looking after myself, bad at interacting with others, bad a sports, bad at chores, bad at being a student, bad at being a friend, bad at being a partner, bad at just being a person, really. And as far as my brain has been concerned, this is a fundamental truth about me.
Over the years, I’ve had partners, family, and friends tell me that I’m distracted, distant, not present, lazy, unmotivated, disrespectful, and cold. Exes, roommates, and friends have told me the hated living with me, that sharing space with me was stressful, frustrating, and overwhelming because of how forgetful, tired, lazy, and unobservant I was. They hated how I couldn’t listen, didn’t do things like they did, and seemed so tired and exhausted all of the time. Before our breakups my exes had expressed that I was unfulfilling to them over time, that I seemed out of it, that I wasn’t getting better, and that they were tired of feeling let down by me. As far back as my youth I distinctly recall teachers who, granted did not know I had ADHD as I didn’t either, taking my symptoms as me being lazy, unmotivated, troublesome, rude, disrespectful, a delinquent and anti-social problem. They’d yell at me, berate me, send me to the principle who’d yell at and berate me more, they’d warn me that I’m messing up, that I’d fail and that I’d be held back in life if I didn’t shape up.
And yet, nobody told me exactly what I was doing so wrong, or how I was supposed to magically fix it… just that I had to, or else…
Or, if there was specific instructions it essentially boiled down to: “could you not be you anymore, because it makes me feel bad and I don’t like it, and instead do all of this to be what I want you to be?”
To top it all off, my father literally criticized and berated me my entire childhood for all of this too. He’d get into what my mom and I referred to as “Sargent Major” modes where he’d stomp around the house and aggressively demand everybody stop what they were doing and to do exact what he wanted us to right then and there. He’d come into my room unannounced, making me feel constantly on edge about my privacy, and he’d force me to stop whatever it was I was doing, no matter what, and would yell and intimidate and denigrate me until I did what he said. Usually, this was a chore of some sort, which I also could never do right. It was never done fast enough, or properly, and he’d make sure I knew how disappointed he was, how tired he was of me, and how much he looked down on me for it.
Being me in general just started to feel like an inherent character flaw.
Of course, now I understand that people tend to get very frustrated and angry at neurodivergent folks for not experiencing, expressing, or doing things the same ways they do, and it’s very common for them to criticize, demean, punish, intimidate, threaten, and attempt to control, often angrily, the behaviours that they don’t like. If that doesn’t get the desired immediate result then we’re told to “fix it” but without any guidance, or tools, or support, so, when we inevitably fail to meet anyone’s expectations about any of this the cycle just continues and creates a lifetime of self-doubt, anxiety, low self-esteem, low confidence, and fear.
So, when I say that criticism and rejection, be it perceived or actual, causes me severe anxiety, panic, and deep, deep emotional despair, I mean it. I generally don’t have a good impression of myself. I generally feel useless, annoying, unworthy, and like I’m a burden. I feel responsible for every bad thing that happens around me, and responsible for the feelings of everyone I interact with. I’ve literally been told these things for most of my life by countless people who I’ve been extremely close with, who were parents, teachers, employers, friends, lovers, and partners.
After hearing it over and over and over again it’s become a deeply ingrained truth to me that I, Nillin Lore, am broken. I am a mess, I am a letdown, I am a failure, I’m not good at anything and I’m not good for anyone. I am an unlikable and unfulfilling person to live with, be around, or to have a relationship with.
Living In the Future, Motivated By the Past
One of the biggest struggles I have now, which was once a coping technique that I used while living in toxic situations and with abusive people, is that I tend to emotionally monitor. I’m hyper vigilant of what everyone is feeling around me and I have a habit of internalizing all of it. And I mean all of it… always. This comes from decades of being made to feel like the frustrations, anger, disappointment, or sadness of others were my fault. Be it dad telling me that he was mad because I was so lazy and messy, or one of my exes saying that my ADHD made it very hard to live with me and that it was very overwhelming being with me, or a friend telling me that they feel like I don’t care about our friendship enough and that they are tired of me using my mental health as an excuse, I seemed to cause a lot of issues to those around me with how I operate as a person.
To mitigate that, I tried to be extremely aware of everyone’s emotions around me and to prepare for when it would inevitably go bad. It’s called affective forecasting, apparently, which involves striving to predict all of the future emotional responses of those around you while devising plans for how to mitigate any and all potential conflict or turmoil. It was exhausting, and continues to be exhausting even now as my brain still snaps back to these things whenever I sense unhappiness or frustration in my partners.
A Decade of Direct, Overwhelming Rejection (Actually)
Generally speaking, I still assume that at any given time I’ll lose all my partners. They’ll have had enough of me, finally hit their breaking point with how annoying and frustrating I am to be with, and they’ll rightfully want out. I catastrophize about it all the time. Daily. Sometimes hourly.
And the worst part is that it genuinely doesn’t really even feel irrational to me given the evidence of it up until now.
In the mid 2010s, after I came out as trans queer, my dad, sister, and entire extended family of cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all explicitly disowned me, stopped talking to me, cut me out of their lives, and in some cases also became verbally abusive and clear about their disgust of me. In the early 2020s I went through a traumatizing separation after a toxic living situation escalated into me being replaced and isolated in my relationship and home with a violent metamour. Shortly after, I lived with a verbally and emotionally abusive roommate who would scream at me, cry, holler accusations and call me names, insisting that I was disrespectful and burden on the house until ultimately forcing me into an emergency move overnight.
Then, after slowly trying to get back on my feet and rebuild a strong inner circle, I got dumped by three partners and 3 lovers in a row after yet another ex ended our relationship on the note that I was a messy, lazy, unfulfilling, unfeeling, and unfocused burden to them.
Y’all… it’s a lot to unpack. And it’s hard to ignore the messaging when it’s consistently that negative.
And Now Everything Feels Like Rejection
I perceive practically every negative interaction I have, including cancelled plans or not being invited out to things, as rejection. For example, I can fall into deep, intensely negative despair periods centred around not feeling like I’m an actual part of my polycule. Logically, I know that’s probably not the case, yet I often hear about my partners, metamours, and even play friends, in that circle making plans together to go to events, to have casual social nights, go on trips, go to the lake/camping, and I wish I could be a part of those things. That being said, I also realistically wouldn’t even attend a lot as my sensory issues and anxiety make it hard for me to be at loud events, surrounded by tons of noise and activity.
Still, not being explicitly invited or considered as part of “polycule” plans often feels like rejection, and really hurts. Not that anyone is even doing anything wrong! It’s not on other people to make room for me in their lives and in their social circles. But I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hit me real hard nonetheless.
Body language can be a big one too. If a partner pulls away as I hug them or kiss them, be it intentional or not, regardless of reasoning, also tweaks it. It can be entirely accidental, like them not noticing I was coming in for a cuddle as they were getting up to go to the bathroom, or get a drink or something, but my brain has already jumped to the rejection explanation. My anxiety spikes, I start stimming more, biting my nails, dissociating, overthinking it all, and it takes a lot for me to come back from that.
Being left on read, or not responded to for days at a time is another trigger. I may start off messaging excitedly and confidently, but the longer the wait for a response, especially if I see that they read it and then hours have gone by, the more likely I am to hyper analyze it. I’m likely to go back to edit or delete what I sent, check the chat incessantly, or just shut down entirely and put my phone away while feeling bad it. It fucking sucks.
But hey! It’s not all dread and shame spirals! There’s a lot of work I’ve done and continue to do to cope with all of this and to develop a, and I have an awful lot to share about that too. However, I’m already over 2000 words here so check back in a couple of days for the follow up post filled with tips, tricks, and examples of stuff that has helped me work with my RSD in productive and empathetic ways.
Thank you for reading, folks! If you have similar experiences, please share them in the comments below!