In the first post of this series, I wrote about my history with ADHD. The second post was about how ADHD has affected my creative process.

This third post is going to be a little more serious, a little more personal. ADHD doesn’t only affect my creativity, it affects everything. It makes it hard to maintain relationships. I struggle to complete daily household chores and other errands. ADHD even affects my ability to hold down a job (fun fact: I was nearly fired twice from my last job for poor attendance).

Even making a simple phone call feels like a Herculean task some days. If I remember to make it at all.

Here’s another fun fact: I had no idea that ADHD could affect so many aspects of my life until last year. I always thought I was just lazy. Is it silly of me to resent my parents for not getting me support when I was a child? I can’t lie and say it doesn’t sting. Okay, so my dad didn’t want me to be medicated–fine. There were/are other therapies they could have pursued.

But as someone once said to me, I am the quintessential middle child. My older sister is 10.5 years older than I and was wild. My younger sister is autistic. I reckon my parents didn’t have a lot of time for me.

As ADHD is like an invasive species of ivy grasping at everything it can, it’s hard to parse how it’s had the biggest effect on me. I’ve given it a fair bit of thought, though, and I think I’ve come up with the answer.

How familiar are you with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria? The people over at ADDitude describe it like this: “Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) is extreme emotional sensitivity and pain triggered by the perception that a person has been rejected or criticized by important people in their life. It may also be triggered by a sense of falling short—failing to meet their own high standards or others’ expectations.”

When I first read up on RSD, so much of my life made sense. I often assume I annoy people with just my presence. I often hold a lot of myself back from fear of being rejected or misunderstood. I am very quick to anger if I perceive rejection. And I anticipate rejection everywhere.

All this has culminated into an isolated, lonely life, as I struggle to form and maintain friendships. It’s also meant a lot of false starts and dropped projects–if I’m not immediately successful at something, I ask myself, why bother?

That’s the point I’m at now. I had high hopes of being successful on this blog and my Patreon and being a published writer, but so far things aren’t going as I wanted them to, and I’m struggling with feelings of hopelessness and wanting to give up. It’s taken all my mental energy the last few days to not delete my blogs and social media accounts and slither back into obscurity.

Realistically, I know that would be a silly thing to do. I have had some success: I’ve landed a few editing gigs, I’m gaining traction on this blog, and I’ve had a few of my poems published already with more to come. But it doesn’t feel like enough for my ADHD brain to be satisfied.

I said once I don’t think I’d ever seek treatment because, at my age, I’m set in my ways and resistant to medication. But over the weeks of writing up these posts, I’ve started to think differently. I may seek out treatment, after all. I’m sick of feeling this way.