Running Everything On Manual: Responding to “But Everybody Feels That”

“Doesn’t everybody feel that?” You hear it all too often when you’re neurodivergent. I was trying to explain what RSD — rejection sensitive dysphoria — felt like while managing an episode of it, and was doing a poor job. I’d just quoted neuroclastic: RSD can be incredibly intense, and we can feel it to the core of our being as intense physical pain, discomfort, and sensory overwhelm. It can be almost impossible to reign in these sensations when an intense episode is triggered. But it still wasn’t getting the feeling across. That it’s not just “oh, I feel rejected” in the same way. That I wasn’t whining, or trying to hold a pity party. I was fully aware that my reaction was disproportionate to the objectively small triplet of rejections I’d been hit with that morning. Living alongside the wave of RSD was my extreme annoyance at experiencing it at all. But that realization led me to a better comparison. We all are affected by blood sugar. Whether it’s a “food coma”, being “hangry”, or…