Everything I do. Every fucking second of my life. Is trying to feed the massive fucking black hole of RSD in me. Everything is begging for positive feedback. EVerything is people pleasing, but in ways that actually just put people off.
Noone loves me like I love them. Noone. Not one person. Im always the initiater. I send people memes, they dont send me shit. And oh ACTUALLY the WHOLE TIME I was actually ANNOYING THEM by sending them stuff.
It leads me into such awful, desperate, sometimes even fucking abusive behaviors. Manipulative. BEGGING for feedback. From everyone. All the fucking time. Taking advantage of nice patient people until I wear them out. I ping people too much. Sometimes I ping them again if they ignore the first one. I don’t take ignoring a message for a no. I always am like “maybe they missed it or maybe they were too busy at the time and forgot” and sometimes that IS the case so it gets confusing.
People leave me constantly. Not always because of this but I’ve had like, five noteable peopel leave me in the last couple years. I have no irl friends left. Sometimes because of me neglecting those friendships and distance. But also my ONE really close irl friend left me because of a stupid misunderstanding. And I officially confirmed that Ive lost someone else today, this time over EXACTLY what i’m talking about.
I’m fucking exausted y’all. And I dont know what to do. There’s no fucking medication for RSD. Coping mechanisms dont work. I cant fucking deal with this anymore. I’m fucking tired.
I’ve been looking at my own life and the potentially harmful behaviors I exhibit as a response to trauma and neurodiversity. I mirror and use a fawn response automatically at the first sign of fear or the possibility of rejection.
It took me until a few weeks ago to realize I didn’t need to laugh if I didn’t find what someone said funny, even if I know they expected a laugh.
I’ve felt a lot of shame about my behaviors and defense mechanisms. But I started to accept that I had to develop certain survival tools to navigate an allistic, capitalist world. Those tools don’t help me as much when I’m trying to genuinely connect, which makes it hard as a gay man who already has to do a level of code-switching while being aware of potential rejection/hostility.
You say you’re exhausted, and I believe you. It’s exhausting being in the world as part of a marginalized group. Even worse when the communication is so unnecessarily convoluted.
I wanted to thank you for making posts like these in the ND comm. It helps to know someone else is going through similar struggles, even though I’d prefer we didn’t struggle at all. We’re trying our best out here with less than optimal resources and training. In a better world, we’d be able to communicate and meet our needs without having to jump through hidden rhetorical hoops.
I know you’re tired, friend, but I hope you feel better soon.