Little is talked about how RSD affects all aspects of our lives. If kept in time, it can evolve into constant distress, inability to enjoy joyful activities, and worsening executive functioning issues, like drifting off mid sentence more often, inability to finish thoughts...
Eventually you can be even more rejection sensitive, stuff that didn't cause rejection before will, and it will all pile up until you don't know what not being in distress feels like. Living in the now when you're in this state is not fun, because you don't see yourself out of it
Every passing day gets harder, the need to escape all that becomes even stronger, any stimuli might cause a meltdown, even causing extreme avoidance from anything that might cause potential rejection, turning into social isolation, leaving jobs...
This can lead to different levels of dissociation, when the suffering gets so intense the brain tries to protect itself. And even worse, intermittent dissociation from feelings alternating with intense moments of painful rejection. It's not a joke, it's serious and very impairing
I don't believe RSD is "just an ADHD thing", but a neurobiological tendency to feel things heightened and difficulty to filter emotions (ADHD), paired with a lifetime of struggle due to external factors (dismissal, shaming, even abuse). We anticipate the pain to soften the blow.
It often comes hand in hand with great empathy, that will make us be aware of slight changes in demeanor. It makes us great friends, we know when people have something going on early on. But it will make us interpret any of those changes as a personal rejection.
And that rejection feels real! It's not in our heads. It feels as real and painful as real rejection. And we'll feel annoying for needing the extra reassurance that nothing is wrong. And we'll know if someone says it's all fine but it's not honest and the rejection won't go away.
And the worst part is, we don't see how much we're spiraling down because temporal awareness sucks in ADHD. We don't see the decline, we don't remember better times or how it felt to feel joy. We live in the feeling of rejection, it's all there is.
And then, we pretend we're okay because we don't wanna be called oversensitive or dramatic again. We try to keep going, to shut it down. But it's there, an unfaltering presence, until we inevitably have a meltdown because there's so much you can take until it all comes flooding.
We become people pleasers to avoid rejection, we overcompensate and apologize too much... it affects our lives in so many ways. And yet, the emotional issues are not even a diagnostic criteria of ADHD. It's mostly unaddressed and untreated. Ignored. And it's SO impairing.
No one even bothers explaining it to us, they don't even bother learning about it. We spend our lives thinking we're broken and oversensitive whiny people, when there's an explanation to it. It's all so unfair and I'm tired and mad.
