Another damned anniversary

Two years ago, my heart started breaking. It was a long and painful process. Many things happened before that night, many things happened after, and many things keep happening. I’ve been breaking for decades now.

Most of all, on that evening, I realized I hadn’t ever achieved my–then–lifelong goal of fitting in. I still don’t fit in. The moment when I fit in will never come. Goal trashed–new goals sought!

But it doesn’t matter, my therapist said. It really, truly, doesn’t matter at all.

And how about feeling rejected all the damned time? That was a thing I realized on that night two years ago, too. I always was and would always be rejected. Don’t ask me why, because I wouldn’t be able to tell you. I’m obviously biased in that I have no objective sense of the world–if such a thing even exists.

The question I’m increasingly faced with these days is, what now?

So you tried to fit in, for decades. It didn’t work. Anything and everything you touched crumbled to bits, too. You might have some as yet undiagnosed disorder–friends keep insisting on ADHD, commonly mistaken for or coexistent with BPD, depression, ASD, anxiety, and, my all-time favorite-slash-what describes-me-perfectly, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. My one and only point of success is: I have a husband and a family. I’m rockin’ it, eighteenth-century-style.

Okay, okay. So, there’s the rejection part, and there’s the self-worth part. Oh boy, the self-worth part is below basement level right now. I can honestly find no purpose in my existence. And, newsflash, there’s not much joy either if you don’t have a little bit of money to enjoy life with. Yes, yes, money doesn’t bring happiness, but being in a state of debilitating insecurity about present and future isn’t fun. Money does bring some measure of happiness when it takes away a mountain of stress–when it makes you feel a little safe in your present and the thought of the future doesn’t cause you overwhelming anxiety. But I’m a dumpster fire in the jobs department. Absolutely useless.

So, no point in existing. And lying down and dying isn’t an option either. What the fuck do I do?

In a sense, there’s been progress. Let’s start with the Rejection Sensitivity part. That friend from my town who’d been a constant, if somewhat rare, presence for years, and who’s been ghosting me for over a year now? Something like that would have absolutely broken me two years ago. But today? I cried about it once. This is, after all, how life is. She can do whatever she wants; she might have her own problems to deal with. Maybe it doesn’t reflect on me. Or I might be too much for her–heaven knows I’m a whole lot for people to handle. So, I only felt rejected for a little while. Didn’t fall apart. Yay, me.

That guy I sacrificed nearly two years of mental health for? In essence (but not technically!) I was the one who broke that off by, I don’t know, being scary, I guess. I wasn’t willing to give a person the lukewarm, talk-to-you-quarterly friendship he seemed to want, after us being thick as thieves for half a year. Friendships, for me, are not a matter of simple spatial proximity.

People rejecting me and leaving me in many imaginative ways happens all the time. But, these days, I’m learning to protect my time and energy, too. My friends (there are a precious and special handful of those, happily) keep telling me I’m often taken advantage of, sometimes by manipulators, conscious and unconscious, sometimes by self-centered bullies who don’t care about my well-being. There is some truth to this, which I’m reluctantly beginning to accept. It’s a process. I’m not there yet, but doing better is all you can do as a human.

As for self-worth? I don’t think we should discuss this right now. It’s abysmal. I know what I can do, what my talents are. What’s more, I know what I can’t do, what I haven’t achieved, and how every single person on the planet is doing better than me in advertising their value and getting something for it.

The question, what now, hasn’t been answered yet. Honestly, I have no idea what now. I know I want to publish books, but good as my books are, I’m an idiot in advertising and selling them. And it doesn’t help that many of the people who tell me we’re in the same boat, and they are idiots in advertising too, sell dozens to hundreds of their books. How worthless are you if people who feel worthless are way above you?

Okay, time to wrap up this anniversary post. Two years ago, someone started breaking my heart. Two years on, that job has been taken over by the most efficient heart-breaker–myself. Maybe I can convince me to give me a break.

Rejection

Have you been rejected? Do you know how it feels?

How about feeling rejected all the time, day and night, during every interaction? How would your life be if your brain interpreted every question, every hint, and the body language of everyone around you as a statement of their dissatisfaction, criticism, and, yes, rejection?

This has been my life for the past thirty years. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you,” a friend would say, and my brain would interpret this as, “I don’t want to spend another minute with you.” This can make communication with people rather cumbersome. You pull away, you try not to get hurt. Or you get angry or sad, bewildering your loved ones, who can’t see a reason for your overly emotional reactions.

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria resembles Borderline Personality Disorder, and sometimes the two coexist, although RSD, I’d think, is more widespread in some way or form. Most people can understand to some degree the symptoms of RSD, and they can relate to the insecurities that produce it and stem from it. This is not what happens with BPD: in my experience, BPD is so exotic that most people just don’t get it. They keep bringing logic into the mix, not getting that reason is simply not accessible to the person having a borderline episode and that the faulty wiring in their brains can’t be circumvented by sheer willpower, calming down, and logical thinking.

My own experience with RSD is that I consistently skew the world around me to fit the self-negating convictions that got cemented in my brain early on. I don’t know what caused this: I do exhibit some borderline traits, but they’re mild, all things considered, even if they look rather intense to the layman. My mother, loving though she was, was also critical and concerned with appearances. I was a very emotional child, and this was discouraged. Don’t react like that! People see you! she’d say. In short, heed others, don’t heed your own needs. I learned to be ashamed of myself early on.

The perception of others’ rejection fuelled by one’s own bad self-image is hard to beat. If you feel unworthy, then pretty much everything others say or do can be warped to mean something negative. Even if someone says, “You’re nice and I like you,” as soon as you say something you perceive as dumb ten minutes later, you think, “Ah, that’s over. They’ll hate me now.” It’s a very unhealthy way to be in your brain. And I lived like that for ever.

This was compounded by my academic life. The PhD and then post-doc life is a string of people finding themselves in new environments, quickly building support systems, then going on their way to their next academic appointment. I never partook in all of this because I was literally unable to live on my own. Due to mental health problems, I’ve never been truly independent. I had my husband, who was there to provide a safety net. He still is, now that I’m officially taking care of my and my family’s mental health. My occupation right now is, strictly speaking, ‘housewife’. So I didn’t really enter the student communities I found myself in to the degree others did. I did, however make friends, some of whom stayed in my life in some form or other even when they moved away, and some of whom just didn’t. My default way of thinking was: people don’t keep in touch. People abandon me. When I made friends with other post-docs, I was careful to have low expectations: people just aren’t like me. They don’t devote a lot of their time or mental and emotional energy to the friends in their life. I’m just not as important to them as they are to me. Which, if you think about it, is another form of rejection.

Let us not dwell right now on how devoting too much mental and emotional effort to friends can break you in unique ways. The point is: was my assumption true? Does everybody leave me?

I had a long hard look at my relationships these past couple weeks. What I found when I approached the matter with as much objectivity as possible is the following:

I have three good friends in Greece. There were more with whom I tried to keep contact through the years, but they weren’t responsive. I don’t know why. Life? We’re all busy, I suppose. If you asked them, they might tell you they love me and truly want to catch up when I’m in Athens. But I don’t see any effort on their part. The way I think about it, you can’t claim to love someone and not send them a text in ten years. But: there are three people who I consider close friends. That’s a lot. There are also some with whom I reconnected after years, and I daresay some of those I might end up meeting again. Also nice. All in all, not as negative as I pictured it to be. Those three friends I trust completely, and I’m not exaggerating.

There are some from my Germany and France years, not all of them close, but nevertheless keeping sporadic contact. And then, there are some I’ve met through social media, and who are now important in my life. Of those, I talk with three pretty much every day, although two of them are in the States and I’ve never met them in person, and there are a couple more I’m fond of. The most important among those people is Dimitra, who’s been in my life for eight years and was the one that guided me through the long, drawn-out process of healing after my breakdown, mental-health-wise. I’m talking almost a decade of care here. What does this say about my claim I’m always being rejected or abandoned? Most people don’t have a free personal life coach on call, someone who loves and cares for them this much.

And then, there are the people I lost touch with. If I see this objectively, it wasn’t really always their fault. I’ve told you before: I’m a difficult person. Often, I’ve outgrown people (maybe they’ve outgrown me, it’s all relative). I don’t care to connect with them anymore. This happens. It happens to others, too. Just because I have a knack for perceiving lack of communication as rejection, it’s not necessarily true. Just because I always give (too much!) energy to many people outside my family, it doesn’t mean that it’s right. I did crash badly last year, after all. The burnout was definitely exacerbated by my tendency to help everyone with everything, even offer help when I was already too busy.

Well, I’m not doing that anymore.

In short: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria makes you see the world in a warped way that doesn’t really correspond to the objective reality–or what could pass as objective reality in a world where everything is relative. Humans also have the tendency to gloss off wins but focus on losses. Minimising loss is the main focus of our brains (I recently read “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Kahneman, which explains, among other things, how our brains perceive loss–wonderful book!) and it’s also the mother of several fallacies.

I don’t know if this helps you in any way. This was a personal account of what happened in my life. I’ve only been able to recognize the truth after serious help from loved ones and therapists. I don’t have a recipe to treat RSD. The only thing I can say for sure is that it needs time. After three decades of this, I’m still learning.

“That, my friends, is a great book.” –Rebecca Hefner, author

19. Discovering you matter

<< 18. When he cries

It’s been eight months since my last post, and as you might imagine, a lot has changed in that time.

Where do I start? There have been so many discoveries about my husband, myself, my children, my feelings and their feelings and even other peoples’ feelings, about perceptions and misconceptions–some of them truly astonishing–that I find it hard to focus on one.

But let’s try. The biggest thing is something both my therapist and our family therapist suggested after observing us for a while: my husband might be on the autism spectrum.

Now, this was a shock, but maybe not for the reasons one would expect. To me, it was mindblowing for the simple reason that I finally realized I matter. You might not be able to understand how someone in a long-term, devoted relationship might be horribly lonely and think they don’t matter, but this is exactly how my life came to be after years (and years!) of being lonely while being with someone.

The times I screamed at my husband, “If you don’t want to be with me, just leave!” are too many to count. Nearly every evening of our life as a couple I spent practically alone–he had his computer, his programming books, his podcasts, the videos about fountain pens. Excursions were hell. Okay, we had small kids, which does complicate trips a lot, and it turned out I had high levels of chronic anxiety, so excursions were bound to be a strain, but still: my husband got squirmy, he resisted, he shouted, everyone got stressed whenever I tried to get us out of the house. Not a nice way to spend days that were supposed to be relaxing. But staying home all the time wasn’t an option either. Kids need fresh air and movement. They go crazy if they’re home all the time–something that has become obvious to many parents during this long, torturous lockdown.

So, here I was eight months ago: I’d never traveled as I wanted, because Urban never wanted to move from his favourite place–which is a chair in front of his computer. Stressed, juggling the emotional health of the family, dealing with a sensitive daughter who suffered from anxiety issues herself, and trying to keep dad on an even keel because his outbreaks were seriously damaging the peace in our family. And on top on all that, I realized I didn’t even want to spend time with my husband. I didn’t even feel remotely inclined to have a meal with him at a restaurant anymore, because there was nothing to talk about. I was bored. I knew there were things that interested him, but he sure as hell didn’t talk about them with me. So, I’d have meals alone, with a book, with a friend.

When I told my therapist all of this (and a bunch more), she frowned and asked, “Is he autistic?”

Welp, turns out the family therapist had the same suspicion, which is why he was insisting on Urban starting therapy ASAP. We found some online tests (on serious websites!) in which he scored highly, which means that there’s a high probability he’s on the spectrum. My husband was shocked. It couldn’t be. Could it?

Then we started thinking about what we knew to be his quirks. Never tolerating help at tasks like repairing things (trying to help him is a surefire way to cause a serious meltdown). Not being able to cope when days don’t follow their usual pattern (this is why Saturdays have been hell for the past 8 years). Not understanding what others feel. And, most of all, not being able to connect emotionally with me, although–it turns out–he actually has feelings. Strong feelings. Feelings he thought were clear.

Now, as you might expect, getting a diagnosis of adult autism during a lockdown is, to put it mildly, nearly impossible. There are precious few experts on the matter of adult autism, and stats show that high-functioning adult autism is often hard to detect because individuals learn to adjust and mask so well when questioned by others. The reason we came to the conclusion was that I knew Urban so well. In a conversation with someone who doesn’t know him, he appears perfectly neurotypical. This is why his therapist, I think, isn’t convinced. She doesn’t see the meltdowns. She doesn’t know about the fidgeting.

Anyway, next week Urban has a first appointment–with volunteers, not a therapist or psychiatrist, sadly–for a first assessment. We don’t know if they’ll find anything, or what they’ll find, but I surely think the suspicion of ASD has helped us already, if only by making me understand things aren’t always what they seem to be. Hostile reactions can have reasons other than mistrust or dislike. Being overwhelmed by tiny things as an adult is perfectly possible. And, most importantly, just because you don’t feel love from your partner, it doesn’t mean it’s not there. It might just mean his way of making connections is underdeveloped.

Anyway, that’s it from me for now. I’m writing, editing, trying to fix my family’s mental health, and as you might imagine, I’m exhausted. Still, I decided to not postpone publishing my books anymore. My writing is what brought this change about, and I’m going to keep writing and publishing for as long as life and our mental health journey can perplex and inspire.

“That, my friends, is a great book.” –Rebecca Hefner, author