How much longer does one have to spend self reflecting, before it changes from a critical self assessment in the hopes of fixing personal flaws, to a dwelling on, and unhelpful rumination of ones faults? On the surface, it seems like a simple answer; when the process stops being helpful, and begins to hinder you more than the original flaw.

But what if reflection IS the flaw? At what point does one stop thinking about what or how they believe about themselves or how they react to the world, because it is a disservice to their or others lives? If this line is never drawn, and done in the name of vanity, or self importance, we call it narcissism instead of self esteem. If done towards another because of their position or policy, we call it a critique at best, or a condemnation at worst; the line seems to get blurred the further you get away from the meaning or intent, but at least there is a line to be drawn; and we have plenty of sand.

Why do we as people, find difficulty in admonishing ourselves for our own shortcomings, but are so quick to jump onto others because they don’t fit within our ideals? We judge both ourselves and others exponentially deeper based on a snippet of a moment, and internalize it when directed at ourselves, when so many struggle to give the same effort at looking at even the most negligible and recurrent of their own faults, without a precipitating criticism to cause it? Humans are social animals, and there’s a lot that goes into what that entails, but at what point do we as a society accept that we need a line in the sand between a brief reactive judgement that’s worth internalizing and rectifying, and the aberrant noise that is the passage of time and coincidental impact? That line we draw gets blurred as time moves on, but what causes us to mark that spot in the first place?

One of the best pieces of advice I have come across, that I still struggle to move past conceptualization, and put into practice, is the idea that everyone in life is more worried thinking about themselves, than they are thinking about you. Initially, I found it slightly alarming, a society of egotistical narcissists is not the one I would prefer to live in, but after thinking about it, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Before reading this, were you thinking about your coworker that you haven’t seen more than in passing the last few days? Or the cashier at the coffee shop that you stopped by on the way to work? How about the last time you gave thought to your elementary school teacher? Unless you are actively dealing with a situation involving any of them, I doubt they were more than a wisp in the recesses of your mind until now.

So why do we hold on to the brief moments that keep intruding on our thoughts? The moments where we perhaps broke a status quo, or social faux pas, that caused us the most briefest moment of embarrassment, and the slightest inconvenience to the others? Do you constantly think about the time the cashier spilled coffee over the counter that day you were a little later than you wanted to be on the way to work? Or the coworker who accidentally made your job harder because they spoke without thinking of the consequences, or forgot to keep the right records of what was good or bad, before giving you subpar instructions?

I would hope the answer to be, ‘No, I do not hold grudges to the extent that it hampers my ability to exist’, and if it does, I hope you take a moment to understand why that isn’t a good way to exist, before continuing on with any of your likely numerous others problems that you face. We are all humans, and we all have flaws, and generally the world may be critical of you in the heat of the moment, but I’d hope that for most things you do in your life, you can at least move past it with time; if not forgiving yourself, at least allowing the feeling of suffering to consolidate to a more manageable level, allowing you to put it in the mental box that was made for it, opening it when you are able and willing.

My life became slightly more simpler, when I began to remember that most people have already forgotten about me for the time being. Not because they don’t care for me, but because life is just as busy for everyone else. Sonder. For all the awesome and terrible things I have seen and done in my life, the thought that everyone else is feeling the same way about life in some form, and have their own countless complexities and decisions to be made, helps remind me that while I do have faults, I do not lie alone at night, wondering if what I am doing with my life is the right way, any more or less than anyone else.

I’m currently dealing with a rather crappy situation at work. I overstepped a line, because I was under the impression the line had already been scrubbed away. I was planning on asking about that very same line in a meeting a couple days away, but the process got to me first, and what had started as a relatively well educated and researched attempt to improve the work lives of my coworkers quickly devolved into a flurry of discussions on lack of foresight, and malicious intentions, and continued escalation, with nobody, myself included, actually knowing the whole picture before decisions are made and consequences dealt out, however temporary those might be.

I was in the wrong, and I have no issue admitting that. I am prepared to accept the consequences, no matter how strict or lenient they may be, because that’s where a stoic minded individual should strive to be. Come whatever may, it happened, and I cannot do anything to change that fact. So for me, it is simpler to accept fault, and move on with life, despite the outcome. Others may hold it against me, and I might find it brought up in the future, if the conversation requires it; but that is an issue for them and I at that time to deal with and discuss, not for the me in this moment to worry about. At least, that’s where I strive to be with all of my life choices: to dwell on any choice longer than to accept that it was made gives more power to the thought of the action, than the action itself.

But if that’s the hope, why then, do I find such difficulty in separating the thoughts of  my own faults from the thoughts on the faults of others, when I already accept that people are fully capable of making their own, erroneous mistakes. One of my personal laws is ‘Never attribute to malice what can equally be explained by incompetence or oversight’, and while it’s not a perfect law, it is malleable enough to give me a consistent appreciation that others make just as many mistakes as I do, and judge their own times of shortcoming just as harshly, and not every incident of intrusion stems from an intent to harm others. Mistakes on many levels are what got me to this position I find myself in, and I can accept all of them in quick succession. As long as I have a possibility of recourse to attempt to append or fix the issue, I am content with letting them fade into the background of life for the time being, because that’s what I hope I have afforded others in my life; the ability to make mistakes and learn from them. As long as one doesn’t make the same mistake twice, you can consider every mistake an opportunity for growth.

But those aren’t the thoughts or issues I find myself ruminating on. With my life’s relatively recent pursuit into understanding what part of me is me, and what part of me is just side effects from my ADHD, I find myself at this crossroads far more often than I thought I would be. I stand at this blank signpost often, and each time I remember the countless times I was at this point before.

When I began realizing I wasn’t forgetful, I just forgot to remember, to accepting that while I may forget to respond to friends and family, the ones that understand and like me for me will continue to reach out at times to make plans, despite that, and are the ones worth trying to remember harder. Or when I found myself becoming anxious because I fully feared my mother had been involved in a terrible car accident my roommate casually mentioned caused him to get home late as the reason for her not arriving within 15 minutes of her text message, and the long rumination that helped me realize that my job and experience has modulated my latent anxiety to become less invasive to my daily life, but instead had displaced a far more realistic and visceral variety, purely because I have no other choice but to live in the now, and needed help. Or the aimless self deprecation that accompanied the years of being single after not only my last relationship, but the one before that as well, ended with being cheated on and unceremoniously dumped both times, and the final understanding that I, being young and inexperienced, had poor taste in partners at the time, and the flags were red, and large, and waving, only for me to mistake joint physical contact with emotional connection, rose tinted glasses finally coming off as this same blank signpost shielded my eyes from the sun.

So I stand at this place again, today, wondering which path actually led me here. For many, the crossroads is the time of their choice in making ones way; a chance to pause and reconnoiter, before making a decision on where to go from here. For me, however, this crossroads IS the destination. A place where I can stand and see all avenues that lie before me, spread bare across the desert sands that bear the footprints of my past. It is only when I am here, that I can look around and fully understand and appreciate why and how I ended up standing in this spot, and fully understand how and why I made the decisions I made in my life.

I have been remiss in explaining the point of this post. I’m partly writing because I needed an outlet; the most pressing stresses in my life are currently on a timer, and if I don’t find something to do, I end up lying in bed watching television, or staring at my phone, or taking naps throughout the Days of Nothing in misguided hopes of bringing the Days of Something closer that much faster, so I don’t accidentally forget them.  I’m writing because my girlfriend had to work a day shift today, and my current lack of structure has led to me being over-medicated, and under stimulated, while accidentally on a sleep schedule that, while normal for most of the world, is not good for interacting with the exhausted woman who is fast asleep before 9PM, having worked the first day shift either of us have done in recent memory. I’m writing because I have a book I want to write, and if I have learned anything about my paths of hyperfixation, the only way to get myself to do something as lofty and esoteric as that is to practice forcing myself to do something similar, in a time when I should otherwise be doing something productive. I’m writing because I have training I needed to do weeks ago, but I procrastinated (as is tradition), and I needed to do SOMETHING while the videos play on in the background.

But really, I’m writing this specific thing, because I realized that earlier this week, I let my mind get the better of me. And it took me several days to realize, not to mention my girlfriend having to perform the act of literally dragging me out of my bed after 3 days of me not eating, and not leaving it of my own volition, to realize that is why I needed to write this out.

To give you more context; For those of you who don’t know, Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is an extremely common comorbidity (some studies say 99% of those with ADHD suffer from RSD in some capacity) of those suffering from ADHD. If you know anyone who has ADHD, I HIGHLY suggest looking further into it, but for those of you reading this because you have nothing better to do than read my mental musings for abject entertainment, I offer this brief primer, so you can understand why it’s important to bring up, if not conceptually, than at least enough to understand why you’re reading so many words that seem to otherwise ramble about nothing.

RSD can be described as a condition where the mind undergoes a quite visceral reaction to admonishment or rejection, or the perception of being rejected, and can even result in physical pain, like the pain in your chest that is called heartache after a breakup, as well as physiologic changes in the form of more stress related symptoms like anxiety attacks or severe depression. If that’s it, you might say, then everyone has some level of that. Everyone feels sad after being rejected, so why is it so special in ADHD, that it requires a whole name to make it seem fancy? Well, if you were paying attention, you might already be further on the way to understanding it than you realize.

If you look at my description, I included the words ‘perception of being rejected’. That’s right; individuals with RSD sometimes feel the full brunt of a rejection on a ‘high school crush rejected you in the middle of the lunch room after laughing about it with their friends and the rest of the school’ scale, for things that might not even have happened, or weren’t intended that way at all. In fact, compounding that with ADHD’s whole “Priority Management” system being completely FUBAR, it can lead to a strange juxtaposition where being lightly chastised for forgetting to do a thing and causing more work for one of my coworkers, is on the same visceral response circuit as if I was told I was terrible at my job, and deserved to be fired, and everyone at work agreed. But this circuit doesn’t fire all the time; I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I took every coaching moment as a slight against my person, let alone function in society. But there really isn’t a simple way to avoid it when it does happen; I just have to always be ready to figure it out, and adjust accordingly. Sounds like a fun time, huh?

I have RSD, and in the past, just the thought that someone was dissatisfied with who I was or what I did, could be enough to cause me, personally, continuous chest pain and immediate withdrawal for days at a time. In my school days, I was labeled as overly sensitive, and suffered socially because of that. Thankfully, I was made aware of RSD relatively early on in my initial self assessment of CJ vs ADHD, and was able to quickly and quietly mitigate many of the issues that it had caused in my life at the time, and set myself up with a coping mentality, to avoid falling into that mental pitfall as easily. I still have to contend with it, but most of the time I am able to acknowledge it as a feeling, and thanks to the other changes I’ve strived to make for my way of thinking, am able to differentiate real versus fake slights, acknowledging the former and dismissing the latter, and act accordingly from there.

Which brings me back to why I am writing this. I don’t want to get into to many details, but the thing that happened at work precipitated the first time my RSD initiated in a long, long time: more or less the first time since last year, before I started talking openly about my condition with the world, and being acutely aware of it being a possible issue. And because it had been so long, while I had empirically understood it was something I could have happen, it caught me so off guard when it did, that I crashed and burned almost immediately; the damage done before the thought occurred that I might be overthinking a response. And because the die had been cast, I found myself along for the ride, a driver of a car that couldn’t stop veering to either side of the road, catastrophizing everything and anything in my own mind, and reacting to the world as if such things were the truth. Stress from work compacted this, and all being said and done, I found myself being dragged out of bed, and forced to interact with the world; a cinnamon pinwheel pastry being the first thing I had eaten in almost 4 days, as well as the first step of getting out of my funk.

So, thankfully, after realizing this was the case, suddenly things became very quick to fall into their appropriate boxes. The wrong I did fell back into the box it belonged, and the wrong I perceived fell swiftly by the wayside, something to be contemplated but otherwise ignored unless it grew big enough to be placed in a box of its own. But with the housekeeping of my mind coming to a close, and the roar of the whirlwind that was my brain this past week finally dying down to naught more than the faint whisper of a gentle breeze, the only thing that remains is the question I ask of myself every time I find something that has a chance to inhibit how I intend to live my life, and has actually done so: how do I avoid having it happen again?

Which brings me back to the series of questions I posited at the beginning of this post: If the goal is being in a place where I don’t feel the need/ am safeguarded against reacting so viscerally to others comments or attitudes towards me, despite if they are factual or not, and the only real path to that goal is to ensure that I am constantly vigilant of it being an issue, at what point does that constant vigilance become a negative impact on my life, as well as the lives of others. At what point do I go out of my way to intrude on others to simply make them aware it’s a possibility, without catastrophizing and becoming the self fulfilling prophecy that accompanies it?

I stand now at this sign post at the crossroads, each sign pointing a different direction with no words marking their destination, endless sand in every direction, as far as the eye can see. I only know what paths I have already traveled, and how they got me to here. And I just can’t figure out where to draw the line.