Rejection

I was diagnosed with social anxiety disorder when I was fourteen. I sometimes wonder if that was ever an accurate diagnosis, or just the best the doctor could come up with. I think it probably was accurate, at least mostly. But I also think being treated for social anxiety disorder was like putting a bandaid over a bullet wound. About a year ago now, I was diagnosed with autism and ADHD. Both of these are conditions I was born with, and grew up shaped by. Oftentimes, kids with either of these conditions find themselves excluded from the social groups around them. For autistic kids, they often have trouble picking up social cues without being explicitly told them. For ADHD kids, they may understand the cues, but have trouble following them due to their symptoms of impulsivity, hyperactivity, or even just inattention. I think that my social anxiety diagnosis, while accurate, probably stemmed more less from anxiety and more from my situation. A thing about ADHD that a lot of people don’t know about is something called Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria or RSD. It’s basically described as unbearable pain at the idea of being rejected. It doesn’t always have to be true that the person is being rejected! But if someone with ADHD feels like they’re being criticized or teased with mean intention or rejected they will experience RSD. And it sucks. I’ve always described it as blinding pain, like I just got stabbed in the chest. And growing up feeling disconnected from my peers because of my autism and ADHD meant I felt like I was being teased or rejected a lot. It always seemed inevitable that it would happen sooner or later. I kind of wonder if a lot of my social anxiety came from the experience of knowing that I would make a mistake, and I would feel criticized and it would hurt so much I can’t put it into words. Did my anxiety come from a simple chemical imbalance in my brain or from the trauma of feeling like I was burning alive when someone said the slightest critical thing about me?