No offense i didnt spend my entire childhood being made fun of for my interests, fear judgement all the way through my teens and early adulthood, and learn to love what i love free of shame so I could be made to feel bad for enjoying something harmless because “the fandom ruined it/made it cringey”
My graduate adviser gave me the best, least painful, constructive criticism I have ever received. Whenever she needed to tell me to do something differently, she would start by saying, “a lot of grad students have problems with this…”
That calmed me and helped me fully process what she was about to say. It normalized whatever mistake I was making. It helped me realize that it wasn’t going to jeopardize my acceptance in the lab, my university, or academia.
Most of all, I think it was her way of telling me, “I don’t want you to think of this as a disability thing that makes you different and less than everyone else. I don’t want you to spiral into feeling like you’re not good enough and you don’t belong here. I want you to learn from the mistake without feeling bad about yourself.” That was probably what helped most–knowing she cared enough, and understood me well enough, to say that.
This was the first time anyone had actually responded in a helpful way to my deep spirals of self-hatred and frustration in response to criticism. I still don’t understand how she knew. She’d known me for less than a year when she started communicating this way, and had never actually seen most of the symptoms. Yet she intuited a way to help me get past what people now call “rejection sensitive dysphoria” or “RSD.” And I will never forget it.
I hope someday to offer similarly sensitive constructive criticism to other people.
In the meantime, I try to say it to myself. When I drop a plate or glass and spill the contents all over the floor. When I say the wrong word in a sentence, or can’t remember the right one. When I show up late. Whenever I do some annoying disability-related thing.
Maybe saying it to yourself will help you, too: “Remember, you’re not the only one. A lot of people are working on this.”
ADHD is weird because rejection sensitive dysphoria is almost like having an ~unlockable bonus level~ of forbidden emotions that aren’t accessible during normal, day to day living. You can be relatively easygoing and stable and process your feelings reasonably and then – WHOOPS! – seemingly out of nowhere comes a complete meltdown in response to some minor failure and you have to drag yourself out of sight as your legs stop responding and you’re flooded with emotional pain that manifests as physical agony.
There’s normal distress in response to reasonable stresses, which sucks, and then there’s Tornado Sirens And Flashing Lights As Your Brain Declares An Emergency Evacuation because a bug walked across your small but unexpectedly hypersensitive vulnerability.
Tbh? Yeah.
Like I don’t even want to call it “sadness” or “depression” or “panic” or “disappointment” because I’ve felt those things and they suck, but they’re different. I can usually work through them and deal with them somewhat pragmatically. But RSD is like this sudden, incapacitating glitch where my brain accidentally releases every unpleasant chemical at once, and all attempts to fix it result in pop ups of Dennis Nedry from Jurassic Park:
oh my god this is a horrifyingly accurate description of RSD, which for me has the added fun of feeling like I am entirely covered in severe contact skin allergy rashes both on my actual skin (the amount of physical that this manifests as is BONKERS AS FUCK) and also IN MY EMOTIONS. because my GODDAMN EMOTIONS are PATHOLOGICALLY ALLERGIC to like, someone declining an offer to hang out, or my boss telling me “please only tag clearance items on the left side of the package”, or someone writing an angry rebuttal to a joke tweet that I had earlier clicked the like button on, or whatever.
so then it’s like forty times harder to do things that make me anxious, like Ask People To Do Things With Me, or See If I Have Made An Error In Any Interpersonal Relationship, because in ADDITION to having REGULAR GRADE ANXIETY, I also live with the constant terror of HAVING TO EXPERIENCE FULL-BODY HOT TINGLING BRAIN RASHES (or, Shame If Shame Were Also A Severe Burning Skin Allergy) if the thing goes badly! bonus: apologising for a small fuck-up RE-IGNITES THE SENSATION THAT I GOT FROM DOING THE SMALL FUCK-UP THE FIRST TIME which makes me seem like an asshole who doesn’t want to say “sorry” while I’m trying to get my brain to get on board with plans that aren’t “what if we never look this event in the face ever again and both agree to just hide” so my apology typically has to buffer for a minute. cool and fun, would recommend.
DarkestElemental616 