Or: Why The Gremlin Takes It Personally.
If you've spent any time around here, you've probably noticed that the gremlins have specialties. If you're new, let's summarize:
Around here we give the hard stuff names and personalities. Some of them catastrophise. Some of them procrastinate. Some of them eat all the good snacks and leave the wrappers where you'll find them at the worst possible moment. And then there's the one that takes things personally. Everything. Personally. — and this one has been here the longest.
That one has a name.
RSD stands for Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.
Which is a very long and clinical way of saying: the emotional response to feeling rejected, criticised, or like you've failed somehow is significantly, disproportionately, physically awful — and it happens fast, and it's very loud, and it does not particularly care whether the rejection was real or imagined or actually just someone having a bad day that had nothing to do with you.
It's most commonly associated with ADHD, though it turns up in other neurodivergent and even anxiety related contexts too.
It is not being too sensitive. Being dramatic. Being difficult. Needing to toughen up.
It is a neurological response. The dial that most people have set to "noticeable but manageable" is, in RSD gremlin inhabited brains, set somewhere around "immediate, overwhelming and DANGEROUS."
You don't choose it. You can't logic your way out of it in the moment. And you cannot, despite whatever this and the guilt gremlin will tell you later, simply have reacted less.
Here's what it actually feels like.
Someone doesn't reply to your message. Typical people think: they're probably busy.
RSD thinks: they hate you, you said something wrong, go back through every interaction you've ever had with this person and find the exact moment you ruined it.
Your boss gives you feedback that's mostly positive with one tiny, barely-there criticism.
Typical people think:
Good to know, I'll work on that.
RSD thinks: you have failed comprehensively and everyone knows it and that one small criticism is the truest thing anyone has ever said about you. You're useless. One more of these and you'll be fired.
You share something you made. Typical people feel a bit nervous. RSD thinks: Just WHO do you think you are?! Nobody asked for this, nobody needs this! They're all just being polite, take it back, take it back, take it—
You get the idea.
The tricky part is that from the outside it can look like overreacting. And from the inside it doesn't feel like overreacting at all — it feels completely proportionate to what just happened, which is the bit that's hard to explain to people who don't have it. It's not just nervous. It's like you walked into the kitchen to find an enormous grizzly bear raiding the fridge for cheese. Not a gremlin in a bear costume. An actual big bear. With teeth. And intentions. It's crap-your-pants levels of intense and can make even being outside of a blanket burrito terrifying to the point of causing actual, physical pain.
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Afterwards. The battle lost, or won or both. The world the right way up or on its head. You're scarred, missing a metaphorical limb and you're the only nurse available - your entire first aid kit is a roll of pink duct tape and a safety pin. Good Luck with that.
Some people mask it so thoroughly that nobody around them even knows it's happening. They just seem fine. Very fine. Absolutely grand entirely fine.
They are not, for the record, entirely grand. Nothing is fine. Don't EVER play these people at Poker. They'd be banned from Vegas if they'd been brave enough to go yet.
The other thing worth knowing:
RSD also flips. The same intensity that makes rejection feel catastrophic makes acceptance feel like sunlight directly in the chest. Praise lands differently. Belonging lands differently. When someone gets it — really gets it — that lands differently too. It's terrifying and wonderful and intense and even THAT causes physical pain.
It's not all terrible. It's just extremely loud in both directions.
The gremlin that runs this particular operation thinks it's protecting you. Genuinely. It's trying to get ahead of the rejection, soften the blow, keep you from being caught off guard. Preparing you.
It is not good at its job. But then, you wouldn't be either if you were not looped into all the memos like this critter is. He simply doesn't have access to all the data.
But it's trying.
Which is — and I say this through gritted teeth — something.