It’s not an extremely weird thing, right? At least so I thought. I knew I’ve always been scared of failure and doing things the wrong way, but I never realized how big impact it had on my entire life until I learned more about it, and more about myself.

Rejection sensitivity disphoria or RSD, is common among ADHD’ers but I guess others can feel it too. And it’s not just being scared of the typical rejection, it’s being scared of failure, criticism and conflict of all kinds. ADHD’ers tend to feel things quite intensely, both happy and sad. And since we are always a bit different and never really fit in a lot of us use people pleasing as a coping mechanism. Bing social chameleons who always fits in but never feel safe. At least that’s how it has been for me. Always feeling lonely and weird and like someone is watching me critically and laughing att me when I’m doing things the wrong way.

I don’t know when it started, maybe when I was like 13, but it got a lot worse after 25 I think. The perfectionism was taking over my life more and more. It was a slow process and the partners I chose didn’t exactly help. I guess that I chose them because I wanted to learn from them how to manage life. And then I tried to learn to live my own life by myself. But having a constant critic in your own head makes it hard. It’s almost impossible to make good decisions because you question exactly everything from all possible angles. There will always be one wrong angle.

At worst I had anxiety for almost everything all the time and my mind was constantly racing trying to figure out how to please everyone, except myself. I thought that if only everyone was happy with me my life would be more successful and everything would fall in to place. Hint: it didn’t. Instead I ended up in a burnout with severe depression och health issues. I had to force myself into prioritizing my own needs over someone else’s . There were a few times when I really just wanted to die, really badly. But I’m too scared of pain and injuries to take my own life, or maybe I just wasn’t feeling bad enough. But that doesn’t matter. What actually mattered was how I got there and how to get out.

I’m still far from ”out of it”. I struggle every day, especially at work, to se to my own needs without feeling bad or worthless. To just see that I could benefit from letting others do my work, I’m mostly just feeling stressed and overwhelmed.
I struggle to feel that I’m worthy and have value and that it is OK do be wrong and do things the wrong way, everybody does that. I struggle to feel the right to fight for what is mine, like a higher salary for example, or even relationships. I’m an expert in finding faults and imperfections and get stuck on just that. And I struggle enormously with taking criticism in a constructive way.

I feel that I’ve come a long way, but I guess that the struggle will never be over. Like everything in life it comes and goes like waves on the ocean.