aces-to-apples:

inqorporeal:

lierdumoa:

lierdumoa:

I don’t believe that Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is a symptom of ADHD.

I believe that Rejection Triggered PTSD is an inescapable consequence of the our culture’s systemic and institutionalized abelism targeted at the ADHD community.

I literally saw this post the other day saying that hyperfixations are “bad coping mechanisms” people with ADHD/autism use to “run away” from their “true selves” and I wanted to PUNCH THE OP IN THE FACE. 

STOP TELLING NEURO-ATYPICAL PEOPLE THAT THEY HAVE A NEUROTYPICAL PERSON BURIED INSIDE OF THEM, AND THAT THEY NEED TO CANNIBALIZE THEIR PERSONALITIES IN ORDER TO DISCOVER THEIR “TRUE NEUROTYPICAL SELVES” FUCK YOU.

I’m inclined to agree.

For most of my life I thought I was shy or an introvert, and all my therapy treated me as such. But I remember bits of my early life and not being shy at all, and at one point a few years ago my mom mentioned how I’d been such an outgoing little kid. 

I was an outgoing kid. And being alone – physically alone, living by myself – induces more anxiety and outright depression in me than being in a crowd. I’m an extrovert, but at some point during my experience in public school, the amount of peer and adult rejection I received for my neuroatypical behaviour caused me to retreat from social activities and even class participation.

My siblings had it even worse because their symptoms were more pronounced than mine.

This wasn’t an “us” problem. This was an “everyone else towards us” problem.

I was very outgoing and friendly as a child–I even remember, sort of, how it felt to be that way!–but after a certain age, which, I feel, gets even lower every few years, it stops being socially acceptable to be so wholeheartedly enthusiastic about… well, anything, really. My mom still references it to this day, how completely at ease and enthused I used to be around not just strangers, but family! How I was always so excitable, a “social butterfly”, but it changed at some indeterminate point in time. She can’t pinpoint exactly when I “changed”, and puts it down to puberty, but the simple fact of the matter is that when excitement and enthusiasm for the things that you love, or even just like at the moment, are met with increasing scorn and derision, it becomes more and more dangerous on an emotional level to put those things on display. And when you don’t feel safe expressing your positive emotions, you no longer feel safe expressing yourself at all. It becomes a matter of self-defense. We shouldn’t have to defend ourselves by pretending to be fundamentally different.