Fighting Evil by Moonlight

decided to go on vacation from eldritch shit for once, went to Italy, bought a Hawaiian shirt specifically to indicate to himself that he was on vacation. this is played so straight that it took me weeks to realize how funny it is

successfully found the shitty old man who’d been collecting all these cursed life-ruining books and curbstomped him in the Eldritch Shit Institute parking lot when he was leaving his Vents Hideout for the first time in a decade

proceeded to decide that the shitty old man was too pathetic to be the right one and wandered off

quote: “I’m not in the business of helping strays” [spends every scrap second he has doing exactly that]

AIGHT YALL RB THIS POST WITH YOUR ALIGNMENT CHART BLANKS FOR THIS ANON

emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity is by no means adhd exclusive, and people with adhd experiencing those things doesn’t need to have its own special label or whatever when there’s no meaningful difference between someone with adhd experiencing those things and someone without adhd experiencing those things. that’s not logical and a ridiculous mentality of “rsd is adhd ONLY because our rejection sensitivity is SPECIAL” completely goes against building common ground with other neurodivergent people for petty and invalid reasons.

i feel like the case that happens here is that people see adhd and rsd through the lens of false correlation, and by that i mean, they observe a phenomenon that DOES happen, which is people with adhd feeling alienated from their peers and having a negative sense of self when it comes to social situations, and immediately think: “oh! this happens a lot with people who have adhd? must be a symptom!” when rather, it is related, yes, but it is more of a risk.

and this risk is not related to the very existence of adhd, but rather to outside circumstance, specifically ableism and underdiagnosis. during my research, some articles would cite going undiagnosed until adulthood as a higher risk for comorbid anxiety and depression. also, negative labels and rejection from family and peers contributed to low self esteem, negative self perception and oh shocker!/s social anxiety (sources, if you want them, sorry some of them are in portuguese: 1, 2, 3, 4).

#these tags are too short for a full infodump but know #that psychiatric diagnoses are usually labels for clusters of symptoms rather than a Definitive Disorder #which is because the human brain is a fucking mystery. it’s jello that has enough lightning in it to be self aware. #the inner mechanations of your mind are in fact an enigma

#also building off of feral’s tags: emotional dysregulation is a form of executive dysfunction so it can appear in ANY disorder with it #and also appears in traumagenic disorders a lot because trauma breaks both the physical and cognitive mechanisms by which we process emotion #(i.e. ptsd; dissociative disorders; and many personality disorders if you subscribe to the ‘pds esp cluster c ans bpd are traumagenic’ stuff #which is new but what I’ve read of it so far makes So Much Sense)

^^^ goodass tags by @aqueeraphale

And while many people know that mental illness and other disorders can and do go hand in hand with ADHD, there was a small but rather vocal subset within those groups that took the “not crazy” part to a whole other level and were vehemently against any association with mental illness. 

You weren’t anxious of depressed, you just had ADHD! You didn’t have anger issues, you just had ADHD! You weren’t crazy. Your brain just functioned differently. It’s a societal problem, if you’d been born in a quieter time without technology you’d be fine. You weren’t like those people. 

It felt like their way of compartmentalizing their diagnosis, whilst also distancing themselves from the people they obviously looked down on i.e. the crazies in the group like me who openly owned to having mental health issues like c-PTSD and debilitating clinical depression and all the dizzying highs and lows that come with it.

The reason why, if people would just listen to ADHD folks, is not that other neurodivergent people can’t have overlapping mental illness symptoms, it’s that it isn’t a symptom. It’s a community term.

Take hyperfocus and special interest for example. Why did the two terms develop despite a large overlap between communities? Because hyperfocus was developed outside of the psychiatric system, within the ADHD community. As in, people with ADHD talking about their lives and finding commonalities. Special interest is in some official materials. Hyperfocus might well not even exist to psychologists.

ADHD is unique in that most of us don’t even get therapy. ADHD specialists are few and far between (and usually child focused) and the government doesn’t even think of us as disabled. There’s no listing for ADHD in the bluebook for ssi. So most people with ADHD get a medication through a psychiatrist and that’s it, despite the evidence showing that medication is most effective in combination with therapy.

So a group that largely doesn’t even get told what even symptoms they do have when they diagnosed get tossed into the world and told to cope on their lonesome. The concept might match up to what psychologists call “emotional dysregulation” but that’s not what it is. It’s rejection. Most kids with ADHD don’t have symptoms that scare people, they have symptoms that annoy others. The type of reaction most common to that is getting rebuffed over and over again for something that pretty much all of us can’t really help: having ADHD. It’s not just a feeling it’s the fact that in the ADHD community, the type of lives we lead fit a certain picture. And if therapists weren’t going to help? Then we were going to help ourselves and in a way that didn’t put the onus on us (based on the theory of neurodivergence) to change. Neurodivergence isn’t just an umbrella term, it’s a political activist term that expresses a frustration with society. RSD describes how hard it is for people with ADHD to exist and live around neurotypical society.

It’s not for anyone else to water down or to soften the blow by saying it’s our fault. If we just tried harder. If we just got a thicker skin. If we just cared less.

If you read psychologists talking about the term, they describe it as a phrase we use to describe our experiences. They don’t think it’s medically accurate but that’s not the point. We don’t care. They don’t take care of us to begin with. Christ, the number of people I’ve gently coaxed into fidgeting around me because all they know is suppression and hiding. No one tells us it’s okay to be us, period.

The ADHD community- not just people who have adhd but the actual people developing language and concepts to help each other- does a metric fuck ton of work to be okay. Not good, just okay. And people steal our notes all the time. Hyperfixations have never been a part of clinical criteria, it’s OUR word we made up because they refused to ask us why we talked in long rambling sentences. RSD is OUR phrase that we made up because no one cares about ADHD problems, why kids with ADHD lash our and cry lots and struggle with “developmental milestones.” There’s no funding to lengthen our lifespans, come up with specialized ADHD therapies, do more than mention us in passing. All our issues are attributed to depression and anxiety.

No one considers that ADHD was the first thing that ever happens to us.

The mental illness community hardly even remembers we exist, it’s a polarized conversation between people who have anxiety and depression and people who have things like psychosis. The autistic community is the closest ally of the ADHD community and that’s partially because of how many people are just both. It helps that autistic people don’t care what psychologists say about ADHD, the autistic community has been charting its own course outside of the mental health care system for a long time now.

There’s this false idea that because people with ADHD are ignored, we’re privileged for it. That we have the best outcomes. Lots of people don’t graduate highschool when they have ADHD. Nevermind college. A doctorate? A vanishing amount. So why do people want to take our tools, that we had to make to survive, away from us? Use them wrong, without the context and history? Dilute them to meaningless umbrella terms? Refuse to engage with us to actually understand what we mean by them? Tell us that we’re being greedy, or probably ableist and don’t want to be associated with the real crazies? Newsflash: neurodivergent people are often the only people that willingly socialize with people with ADHD. We don’t have the freedom to be ableist and push other people away for petty bullshit. The people that do are the most loud and vocal, but they’re also mainstream and don’t have anything to do with the community that first used RSD and hyperfixation.

I can pass a neurotypical pretty well. I can write these posts and describe my experiences without doubting myself because I was there. But lots of people with ADHD won’t be as articulate because they don’t have the same experiences with the community I’ve had, even on tumblr.

People already have emotional dysregulation. That only got popular after people were like “why can’t I use rsd?” Emotional dysregulation is a clinical term. RSD is a colloquial phrase for something we go through. It’s not your business to decide if it’s different enough to count as “ours” because we made the stick, it’s our stick, you can’t just decide to take it alway because you like it. Lots of people could have a “favorite person” but it means something specific to the community of people with BPD with a history and a host of connotations- but literally the term means something that anyone could do as a result of trauma and getting overly attached. Lots of people could have anxiety attacks because of their symptoms, that doesn’t make panic attacks most relevant to people with panic disorder.

So why is it ADHD specifically you want to be like “no, hey, you can’t do that. You can’t have terms no one else can use. You can’t decide, as a creator of the term, how it gets used in the future, or that we’d be stealing it” exactly?

Just. The absolute gall. I’m very good at passing a someone without ADHD. I’m good at writing long blocks of text. But I’m at a loss for words on how you could just … take from us … and act like we don’t matter in this conversation. Talking over us, belittling us, erasing us. You’re getting told again and again that this is extremely important to the ADHD community and you just. Won’t. Listen. How do I explain to you that you should care about other people? This is a boundary. Not a gate. A boundary for our friggen house.

RSD as a community term was never something that was brought up to me , not even when I was more active in ADHD centric spaces intended exclusively for us. It was more this nebulous thing I knew I identified with, but kept getting conflicting information over. The above explanation about emotional dysregulation and executive dysfunction is how my specialist has been helping me understand it, along with unraveling a lifetime of trauma and how my trauma affects my ADHD (along WITH the trauma that often goes with just being ADHD). It’s been helpful, even if there are still moments and days when certain interactions make me want to curl up and die just from the perceived tone of them. This post being one of them.

But there was, however, I’m sad to say, a real element of gatekeeping and ableism in some of the groups I was encountering that was greatly off putting. And while I don’t doubt what you’re saying about it being a community term coined to express ADHD experiences, it was being used in the instances I encountered to make mentally ill people feel incredibly unwelcome in those groups, regardless of our own neurodivergent status. I had numerous people challenge my ADHD diagnosis when I talked about dealing with depression and medicine induced hypomania. Was I ADHD? Or was I secretly bipolar? (As though you can’t be both???) Fuck, there was even a mod who said she doubted I had ADHD because of my physical health problems, and suggested that I was mistaking chronic fatigue for executive dysfunction. So yeah, there are people who feel like they can afford to be ableist and shitty, and unfortunately in my experience, they were the people quite literally in control of who could and couldn’t be part of the group.

And I hate to say it, but Tumblr is very similar.

I get crap all the time for talking about ADHD. Even when I’m using the broadest and most inclusive of language, I get people crawling into my inbox to tell me “actually that’s not just an ADHD thing and you’re excluding XYZ disorder, you shitty, shitty person.” And that’s not my rejection sensitivity, I’ve legit had people telling me to kill myself over stuff like that.

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start “rewarding” the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

in the most general aesthetic terms possible

1600s: most witch-hunts ended in this century. no witches were burned in North America; they were hanged or in one case pressed to death

1700s: the American Revolution. Marie Antoinette. the French Revolution. the crazy King George. most pirate movies

1800-1830: Jane Austen! Pride and Prejudice! those dresses where the waist is right under one’s boobs and men have a crapton of facial hair inside high collars

1830-1900: Victorian. Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end

1900-1920: Edwardian. Titanic, World War I, the Samantha books from American Girl, Art Nouveau

1920s: Great Gatsby. Jazz Age. Flappers and all that. most people get this right but IT IS NOT VICTORIAN. STUFF FROM THIS ERA IS NOT VICTORIAN. DO NOT CALL IT VICTORIAN OR LIST IT ON EBAY AS VICTORIAN. THAT HAPPENS SURPRISINGLY OFTEN GIVEN HOW STAGGERING THE VISUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ERAS IS. also not 100 years ago yet, glamour.com “100 years of X” videos. you’re lazy, glamour.com. you’re lazy and I demand my late Edwardian styles

Developing a character is about making them seem more like a real person, and real people are flawed. Real people make mistakes. They repeat mistakes. They do things other people don't agree with. Real people are more than just 'good' or 'bad' and character development is about showing all of those other aspects of them.

Their interests and hobbies. The song that gets stuck in their head. The fact that their vacuum broke 3 months ago and they haven't gotten it fixed yet. All of those details help build out the character and develop them more.