Rejecting Rejection

About a year ago, a friend of mine with ADHD suggested that I might investigate the possibility that I experience “rejection sensitive dysphoria,” often associated with ADHD. I did a quick google search and rejected this as having anything to do with my experience in the world. I look back on this now with amusement, because I was rejecting rejection. Of course I didn’t have this problem because I don’t have ADHD and I don’t reject rejection—only people who have serious mental health problems do things like that. Haha!

But as often happens with my brain, it kept returning to the idea. At first, it was only to consider that people around me had this problem. And then, last month, it struck me that of course I have rejection sensitive dysphoria. That was why I’ve been so “successful” my whole life. I hate rejection and criticism so much that I *kill* myself and have since early childhood to be nearly perfect in every way, to exceed expectations by a huge amount, to work myself from dawn to midnight to make sure I’ve done “enough” to avoid any criticism from other people.

I think part of the reason that I didn’t want to admit to this problem is that I’ve long held a belief about myself that I don’t care about other people’s opinions. This belief about myself led me to my autism diagnosis. And I think it’s true that I am often unaware of other people’s opinions of me (blessedly) and that has protected me from a small amount of criticism. But I suspect that even as a child, I had a sense that because I couldn’t tell what other people thought of me, I had to work extra, extra hard to make sure that they approved of me.

Note: I never tried to make people “like” me. Even as a child, I thought this was an impossible goal to set. I was such an awkward child and my autism meant that I always had extreme interests that other people disliked. I knew that I couldn’t be normal, even if I tried to mask my autism, so instead I decided that I was going to be “super” hard-working and smart and obedient and good in all the ways that I could manage. I didn’t think I could get other children to like me, but I did think I could get teachers and leaders and other adults to like me if only I did my homework and followed the rules and made myself into a perfect child. (Sadly, this wasn’t true, either. There were still lots of adults who disliked me because I was weird and didn’t understand the unspoken rules they thought were obvious).

As a writer, I dealt with my rejection sensitive dysphoria by continuing to write the next book. For years, I found it almost impossible to deal with criticism by readers or agents who responded to my writing. I would just write a new book. Ask my first agent and he will tell you that I wrote literally a book every other month and sent it to him, and I was almost paralyzed by his requests for revision. Mostly I just started over and wrote a new book with the same characters on the same topic. Which had completely new problems which he then had to explain to me again.

Then, when I finally figured out how to revise, it was still painful to receive letters that detailed the problems in my book, but I would take a few weeks to process and then was able to get to work. I’m proud of my published books and of my ability to learn how to deal with criticism in something that I loved deeply, writing, and that was a part of my sense of self.

Motherhood has been a difficult thing for someone with rejection sensitive dysphoria to deal with, especially as my children become adults and become more articulate in telling me about the mistakes I made raising them. I suspect other people could shrug off these criticisms in a way I cannot yet do. And it’s worse because I care so very, very much about my image of myself as a very good mother.

I spent most of my life as a writer and a sahm, but now I’m back in a corporate job and I’m once again finding it difficult to deal with criticism. My female bosses have been very good at gentle criticism, but I struggle especially with criticism from male bosses and colleagues. I tend to spiral into “I’m terrible and should quit this job” thinking, even when the criticisms are mild and fixable—and even when they aren’t even fair criticisms. I feel my thoughts sinking into despair, that it turns out I’m not capable of making a living or taking care of myself, and yes, the divorce and the sense of rejection from that (it wasn’t my choice) make all of this more difficult.

I don’t bounce back from failure easily. And yes, it’s also true that I haven’t failed a lot in my life so I don’t have a ton of experience on how to deal with the sense of failure. I’ve very carefully spent all my life trying to avoid failure because I hate it so, so much. When I look back on my behavior in school, even in college, when I started work on final papers the second week into class, because that would help me deal with the crushing fear of future failure that happened if I waited for later. This is probably not ADHD behavior, because I have superb executive function, but it is anxious behavior. I HAD to succeed. I had to be the star student, because if I wasn’t, I might have to deal with failure.

Every once in a while, I think about doing a year-long project of forcing myself to fail every day. But then I put it aside because I don’t think I can make myself do that. I would probably just end up trying to succeed every day and making the project into proving that I can be good at everything, and that is REALLY not what I need right now.