I am the chooser

Is it because I am always wrong

You have to be confident in your body

Because confidence is hot

But you have to have to be thin and thicc at the same time. You have to be fit but not too skinny and have thick thighs but not fat. You have to be all these things and if you aren't you're told to just be confident, because confidence is hot. But how can you be confident when the world is telling you you need to be more or less and that your natural resting body is not enough.

I am drained from thinking, "ah I should eat less to lose fat, but I still have to eat enough to put on muscle so my body is thick but not fat and not skinny. I am so tired of spending hours researching the best way to get abs quickly or build your butt or remove arm fat. I am tired of wanting to do things that are supposed to be for health, for the appearance of my body, but I'm falling back into this again.

Sometimes my rsd is worse than others. Tonight is one of those nights. It feels really silly to overthink the way a simple message is structured and to feel fearful by it. The sentence could be nice, and it's fine. But maybe it wasn't enthusiastic enough, maybe it lacked equal enthusiasm as I did. Maybe I didn't receive an "I" at the start of the sentence and the answers didn't seem very meaningful or like the person was present when they wrote them. I'm also trying to analyse whether it's an rsd thing or if it's an attachment style thing.

Yanno, goodnights were very important to me as a child, I think they helped me to feel more secure, and reminded me that I was cared for and made me feel safe to rest. They reminded me that I'd probably still have my person there when I awoke. If I didn't receive them from my mum the way I felt was right for me, it would make me feel uneasy and it would be harder for me to settle. Trying to look back to my childhood and understand why goodnights mattered so much to me doesn't make a lot of sense. I hadn't necessarily had any abandonment wounds open up for me yet. It could have simply been that I'm on the spectrum. But then again, I used to have to wait almost an hour in bed as a child to say goodnight to my dad, and I wouldn't hold it against him to this day, he was just busy - but the goodnight would matter so much to me that I would stay up very late to have it. Sometimes I would start to think he'd just forgotten and wasn't going to come in at all. When he finally would come to say goodnight, it would often last a very long time - he would tell stories and I'd just listen for ages, even though I was very tired.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that, I think goodnights matter to me a lot more than I realised. I think these could be the reasons why. It's a comfort thing, it's a clarification thing, it's a reminder that my person isn't neglecting my needs and that they actually do choose me first (because it felt like as a child, I was the second most important thing, I had to wait, I wasn't a priority and therefore I didn't feel as important as other things). It's just unfortunate that it's as simple as missing an "I" to "love you" or a "good" to "night", that can make me question subconsciously whether my person truly cares how well I rest, or whether they truly sent the messages while being present with me, or truly thinking about it. They feel like empty messages, even when I know logically that my person does care about me, and they probably didn't at all mean anything less by the way they wrote their messages.

I think this is another thing I have to address in my relationship, I'm always scared that when I bring something up, it's going to end badly or they won't understand. I'm afraid they'll think there's too many things, and it'll start getting annoying. But I think I truly got lucky this time, with this one. I have never felt so secure and safe talking to a person in my life

Anyway,

I think I want to create a safe space for people who experience RSD (Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria) to talk when they need to. There isn't enough research around this, and still to this day RSD is un-diagnosable for this reason. I know it's real though, because I experience it, and there have been so many times when I've had nobody to turn to during an episode where it feels like I am actually dying. For my whole life I lived with this overwhelming pain caused by rejection or perceived rejection. I always used to think, "what's wrong with me, I'm insane, people think I'm crazy, there's nobody else like me, whatever is wrong with me doesn't exist, I'm the only one who experiences this, I'm evil, there's something so wrong with me I cannot be fixed". And it took me at least 5 years of constant personal research and many different psychology sessions with different health professionals to finally discover RSD through a simple Facebook post my cousin had shared. When I read it, I just knew this was me, but the post had also stated that this condition was limited to, if not mostly confined to, people on the spectrum or people with ADHD. I thought to myself, "but I don't have ADHD, so I mustn't have this". And then about a year later I heard something about how ADHD presents differently in females, and so I decided to look into it. I thought by this point if I were to be on the spectrum, then someone surely would have identified that sooner for me, right? Don't all people get diagnosed as children? But no this isn't true, a lot of people don't know they have it until they're older, a lot of the time due to masking. Masking is where we realise we are different from the "norm", and learn how to disguise the parts of ourselves that seem odd in order to fit in and avoid rejection. I had a look at the symptoms of ADHD, and to my surprise, I checked all the boxes. Everything came together and made sense so quickly for me after that. I also learnt how to give myself more compassion and patience and no longer see myself as a lost cause.

I know you're probably thinking this sounds a lot like BPD or Bipolar, and people with RSD may very well have one or more of these mental illnesses also. The differing factor between these mental illnesses and RSD is that RSD is a disorder in which the brain functions differently, and this can be seen in MRI's. RSD also makes the intense pain and suffering felt specifically in regards to rejection or perceived rejection so unbearable, that the only way I can describe it is like I'm dying or that dying is the only way out. It can happen so quickly and from the littlest things. When you experience this, you want to remove yourself from social situations immediately and often all logic goes out the window. It's hard to decipher what is real and what isn't and it brings with it this insane amount of embarrassment because we don't know how to control it, but most of the time know it's probably coming across in the worst ways.

Anyway, the point of me sharing this is not only to spread awareness of this very neglected and real disorder, but also because if there is anyone out there experiencing this too, I want you to know that you are not alone. You deserve to feel good and to be loved and understood too, but firstly you have to give yourself compassion, this isn't your fault and you are not crazy.

Sending heaps of love

On the other hand I am quite excited for my future nonetheless because I know I'm not stuck where I am right now.

Suck it Scomo