ADHD & RSD & Me
How it effects writing & publishing
ADHD fucking sucks.
ADHD (Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) manifests itself in many ways and with different symptoms. It is a spectrum disorder. While there may be similarities, no one with ADHD is the same.
I’m not an ADHD expert, but my experience writing about it has helped people go “Yes! This is me!”
If anyone is trying to literally sell you something on how they beat ADHD, save your money. You don’t beat ADHD. ADHD is a bull. You are either riding, holding on for dear life, and loving and hating it at the same time, or you’re falling off it and hoping it doesn’t stomp you in the mud before the rodeo clowns have a chance to save you.
Everyone’s ADHD is different. A person can mitigate it by masking the symptoms, medication, or learning how to hack their ADHD processes. These options cause unique thought processes to creatively solve problems that lack resources elsewhere in the brain because of ADHD.
I will warn you not to take it as a “woe is me” article. I get it. I do. It doesn’t mean my ADHD does. It doesn’t mean my overall brain chemicals do. It doesn’t mean that I can’t look you in the eye and say, “I understand and agree with your logic, but everything else in my body says otherwise. I can’t get those things to stop.” — but before we get into RSD (Rejection sensitive dysphoria), we have to give you an outline of some other classic issues.
ADHD can affect a host of problems that you don’t even realize are contributing factors.
Executive dysfunction affects pulling the trigger on a decision to the point you can’t make one. I realized this was the reason for my writer’s block. It would suck to have both versions of E.D.).
The attention part of the ADHD people joke with “Doing a task… look! Squirrel!” but in many cases, it’s hyperfocus. We are so in tune with a task that we ignore everything around us. Even bodily functions can be ignored for the task. We know if we are interrupted, we won’t get the focus back, so we dive in. Unfortunately, this also means, “I’m going to watch a couple of TikToks before bed. It’s only 10 pm. Oh, look. It’ is 4 am now.”
Object and emotional permanence mean if we don’t see something, we forget its existence. So if you move something from the last spot we put it, it can be lost forever. People with ADHD might own two of something that you only need to own one. It’s not a backup. The item was just in a cupboard, and they forgot it was there. I have medicine bottles of my ADHD medicine because I moved it and forgot it existed. I don’t take my meds until I get a refill or talk to my therapist.
(It is almost a running joke in response to those that claim that Big Pharma is just trying to get people addicted to meth by making up ADHD. Unless someone finds a hack that works for them, most people have issues remembering to take their meds. So much for drug addiction).
Yes, this could happen to many people, but multiple that by 8, 10, 15 duets/triplets of items. For example, it’s why some people might own 3 plungers and only have one bathroom. You buy extra food, not because you think it’s wise to have that extra loaf of bread before the storm. It’s because you forgot about the other three loves you bought this week the last three times you were in a store. So this loaf will go with the three gallons of milk you purchased.
If you are a collector you and you’re not home, you might see something thinking that you down own it already, only to come home from the convention and you have five of the thing. We own multiple copies of the same book, not because they are different or collector’s items, but because you thought you lost it. In reality, it went from your shelf to an end table. It leads to impulse buying. You go out because you know you actually are out of milk but come back with milk and a PS5.
Emotional permanence happens with people. I might consider you a pal, but I need either an object, task, or have plans with you if you’re not regularly communicating with me. Otherwise, the emotions are used for other energy, and I will forget you exist until something triggers the permanence.
It works backward for emotional permanence with love and relationships because I have deep emotions for you, objects, reminders, etc. If you’re not there, or not talking to the person with ADHD, or not actively triggering love languages etc, well, you must hate us. You don’t love us anymore because you give us the energy that makes us do everything we have to do, and we want to do nothing but please you. I know that I believed I’d fallen in love with people just because of the energy they gave me. I tried to give back and show them my appreciation, but it was taken away. The dopamine, not love. Dopamine is a hell of a drug.
The difference between ADHD and other mental health disorders like bipolar disorder is hyperfocus. We hyperfocus on the lack of contact. We overthink it. Which leads to Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.
Describing Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD and why it’s different from general rejection.
“But Benson,” you ask, “everyone gets rejected at some point and people get anxious in social situations when they worry about how others might see them?”
If you talk to someone with ADHD about getting rejected, it’s not just about feeling down or anxious. Many people with ADHD have physical pain to rejection. The more prominent the person, the more prominent the rejection, the more pronounced the pain. Especially when a person isn’t physically there.
RSD and emotional permanence combo are hell on long-distance relationships/friendships for all parties. You can have these huge pains overtime.
Because of distance (especially with COVID-19), slights and other things build up small rejection. You take it because of who they are. They aren’t even trying to slight you or reject you, but you take it that way with RSD as the void of them not being there outweighs what they do unprompted. I’m not saying people don’t take advantage of it and abuse it, but a lot of it is perceived with RSD.
It doesn’t have to be a relationship, but just someone you got close with. You don’t know why they are hurting you. The person probably isn’t doing anything, nor realize their actions/lack of actions are hurting.
Yet, a person with RSD may react by trying to do better and try harder to please the person to stop.
It can lead to miscommunication (“Why are you acting wierd?”). The person with RSD may pull away. The person with RSD may stop trying entirely and cut off all connections for a long time, thinking they need to take a break and reassess things. However, they are still in pain that whole time. Still, they either go back to try and fix a relationship the other party doesn’t know is broken.
To which the person with RSD doesn’t explain what they are feeling because they don’t want to get rejected for having feelings, emotions, and doubts. They might give a feeler question of “Are you mad at me? Is anything wrong?” (which asking it is asking for pain) and doesn’t get a clear answer.
It builds up until an explosion happens or the person with RSD cuts a person off for good because they can’t take it and they don’t know how to explain it.
Add the mental illness factors usually, the explosion doesn’t come out good for the person with RSD anyway. They will do anything to have the constant pain go away. Outbreaks like this usually leave relationships and friendships irreparably damaged. Sometimes it is done on purpose so the source of your pain will never contact you again because you can’t cut yourself off. Other times it is accidental. Either way, you physically feel like you’re dying.
I had one of these events in April of 2021. It was a build-up of months. In the end, I destroyed a friendship and tried desperately to fix it but couldn’t (that is there, right). I was in bed for three days physically feeling like I was being stabbed in the heart, and they were ripping my ribcage open to squeeze it to death with their bare hands. The only thing that stopped the pain was more pain. After three days of exhaustion of pain, I slept for two. I still feel pain over it every day.
All because of rejections that weren’t there.
Now, you chose to be a writer with ADHD and RSD. What the fuck is wrong with you? When you are a writer or anything artistic, it hurts in other ways. The stress can build up, and you can still explode. Here are are the slings and arrows and bullets that gather up for an artistic explosion that destroys careers or makes people give up.
1. Rejections
- That anthology you submitted for rejects you.
- You try to start writing projects with people but everyone says no.
- You ask for other help (editing, reading this, advice for skills you are weak on), and people can’t help you, pass the buck to someone else thinking that is helping, or just pointing you to a website thinking it is helping.
- Rejections from agents, publishers, magazines, websites, guest blogs.
- People hate your work and let you know about it in no uncertain terms.
- Trolls don’t even read your work and just like to tell you that you suck.
2. Nothing
You believe you have good ideas.
You believe the writing is sound.
But you get nothing.
Not a peep.
For writers, silence is the biggest rejection.
You feel like you’re in stasis. No way to see if you’re moving forward. Since you can’t figure out why you’re not moving forward, you must be moving backward! The rankings on your amazon books are the proof that your head needs!
You start to think that you’re wasting your time, especially if you are trying to do this for the long term. You start thinking you’ll never be good enough and you may wind up quitting.
No answers at all can hit you harder than rejections.
At least with rejections, you can work on preparing yourself so you lessen the damage that the RSD hits you with, but without answers, the wait for the rejection just builds and builds until you either fade out or explode. No answers can be the things made examples to above, in addition to that:
- Little to no sales on your stories.
- No preorders for multiple books.
- No one tries to include you in writing projects you think you’d be perfect for.
- You ask for assistance, guidance, advice, and you literally get nothing back.
- No reviews. Not even bad reviews, but no reviews. You have to pay services to send out ARCs to get reviews even if you’ve given multiple ARCs.
- Everything you release receives no feedback at all. You might get one or two likes on social media posts, sometimes a share/retweet, but you don’t get any comments or feedback at all.
- No engagement at all. You have hundreds of followers but you’re lucky a poll on Twitter gets 10 votes. You try to start conversations but get limited to no responses outside of likes. The blog you write barely gets read. No matter how hard you try to get people to engage it just doesn’t happen.
Because you get nothing, you don’t know what to do, all of those things add up till you go “Fuck this, I’m no good, I quit.”
3. Misunderstandings.
I author under a different name that, quite frankly, is has a lot of smut in it.
I use to give away books from other authors on social media. Sometimes I still post them, but rare.
It’s to hype up my author friends or books that I’ve read that I’ve enjoyed, etc.
But what broke my heart was when this friend, who was an author, said they felt I was using them to boost my sales.
This broke my heart.
I promoted them because they are a good writer, a good person, and someone that I want to succeed in life. I just wanted to showcase them because they are awesome.
I can point them to my lack of sales to show wasn’t the case. I most of my collection KDP just to try to get some feedback! Also if I was getting sales, the money I made got eaten by buying other people’s books to give away to people. I would spend thousands every year just buying people’s books to give away.
Because ADHD can harm the expression of feelings and emotions because of various focus issues.
Someone with ADHD might express something they think is innocent and nonharmful but how it is expressed doesn’t show that. Therefore people with ADHD seem to try to get the last word. Yes, I said “seem to” because we’re not trying to get the last word.
We are defending ourselves, yes, but not for the reasons you think.
We’re defending ourselves because misunderstandings physically cause pain when it leads to a trigger of RSD. We don’t want the miscommunication so we don’t get sideswiped if you don’t understand us later and get frustrated by it.
Some people with ADHD have audio response delays. If we are focused on a task and you ask us something or talk to us, we might respond first (“Huh”) before answering you while you were repeating yourself because it processes in our brain late (This is why many with ADHD like closed captioning and subtitles).
All of the above, especially since nine times out of ten we are masking (concentrating on not letting our symptoms show, trying to adjust personality so we don’t get the RSD symptoms, etc.) and it can just lead to problems.
These things build-up, so we think they are the reasons behind 1 and 2 and you start to wonder why you are in this writing thing.
Writers with ADHD and RSD probably quit faster than most, unless writing and putting things out for publishing itself gives them the dopamine spike.
Usually, those are the ones that don’t have time to get rejected because they are already moving on to something else.
If they don’t quit outright, it slows them down for writing work because they don’t know how it will go over and they don’t want to feel hurt or left down again.
Out of the Three Points:
For me, the first point, rejection, professionally falls under “It’s business. Either people don’t want my business or don’t want me to be a part of there’s and I have to move on.”
Point two, nothing, just depresses me almost every day.
Point three, bad communication, makes me reconsider talking to people.
I have RSD, what can I do?
This is less writing advice but general advice, outside of get therapy and go on meds for your mental illnesses.
- You need to fucking talk about it and tell people. Tell the world.
The best thing that happened to me during my Snowfall launch was an author friend said, “Hey, I have something to to tell you about your launch, but I know you have RSD so if you are up to talking about it let me know. It’s not bad but it could improve your sales.”
Blessed. - If you get feedback from someone important that you don’t like, and it hurts, don’t take it out on them. My best friend and her husband heavily crticized my covers for Snowfall and other works. I mean, they were probably right, but with that hurt came clarity. No I didn’t take their advice, but in the end I knew how I stood when it came down to myself as a writer and unfortunate marketer.
The feedback helped though, knowing full well why I made the decisions I made so when other types of rejections came in (silence, lack of sales, etc) I wasn’t completely dying. I had my blade of grass so I didn’t fall off the earth. - If the source of rejection is a long build you need to ask more than “Are you mad at me?” but “The past few months I feel like I’ve been trying hard to (what you’ve been trying to do). Here are some examples. I need (what you need). I’m hurting and I don’t want to feel this way.” — It still might blow up in your face and hurt like a motherfucker if you don’t get your answer but you need to make sure you’ve actually tried.
- You need to find other sources of dopamine. Hobbies, movies, other people, anything. You need to find a way to switch your brain off. Try new artistic endeavors.
You can’t please everyone with your writing. I can only tell you my experiences and if my experiences echo with yours, well, you can find my DM’s and commiserate and I’ll understand it’s not all about you.
What about you personally?
That’s a story for another medium post.
All I will say is this:
I’d rather you ghost me than trying to say goodbye and wish me well.
Block me, lose my number, etc.
It’s still rejection but it hurts less than an explosion.
Especially if you think you’re important.
Double so if you know you’re important.
