i am

For most of my life, I looked for social connection online. Now as it increasingly becomes the norm, I've adopted a more luddite view that doing so is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm talking relationships of all kinds, friends, acquaintances, romantic partners. Not that there's anything wrong with meeting and engaging with people online, but it's not a substitute for engaging with people physically, materially, chemically.

Even blogging, I'd imagine an audience, imagine that I'm talking to someone. It's an attempt at socializing that all too understandably leaves me feeling less than sated in my basic impulse for human contact. I'd fixate on whether people would be interested or understand my rantings on the nature of the universe and why the meaning life is actually 43, when really, that's a whole lot less important than I'd like to think. 

I used to believe that what goes on in our heads best represents who we are. That sharing long letters explaining everything best encapsulated getting to know each other, but what does this mean when we never really know ourselves? The self being an ever-changing nexus point amidst a vast tangle of ever-changing circumstances, we go down endless rabbit holes trying to sort it all out. 

I want to believe it's who I am, because it feels like taking control of the narrative. I can spend all day explaining myself and giving my thoughts on everything, but I'm not doing anything. I'm not being anything. We are how we behave in the moment, at the whims of so many external factors. I'm tired of being someone forever explaining myself. I don't have any answers. I don't know what the fuck's going on. 

There is a whole lot to who we are that we can't even pretend to control. We might say how others perceive us is not who we are, but who we are is a matter of perspective. Consequences arise from the interaction of all these circumstances. To define ourselves apart from everything else is to create an abstraction, an irrelevant concept in our heads. 

Reality is material. All of these thoughts and feelings are material. The consequences of chemical reactions with environment. Ever more I'm learning this, training with people. Depending on each other, helping each other grow, struggling alongside each other and against each other. It matters that it's all so physical, stimulating chemical reactions without regard for abstractions of who we are. 

What is connection but another chemical reaction? The imperative that I find others like me was pathological. A need to find people that don't make me feel so small. I need to find ways to engage with people who actually exist. I need to get past fears of doing exactly that. Training does that for me to at least some extent. If only I weren't getting sick and injured all the time. What are we when we are nothing to anyone else?

I've realized that who I am doesn't matter. Not in the sense that I thought it did. Not as a concept to be explained, but we matter as the product of our interactions with the world around us. We are what we do with our lives. Try to do better, try to have a positive impact, endlessly entangled in countless reasons we never quite get there.

rejection sensitivity dysmorphia

I've long understood ADHD to be part of my problem, another label to add to the laundry list of mental health problems that have been dragging me down my whole life, but I'm realizing it's more than that. Like so many labels, it feels problematic and inadequate to me. Don't lots of people have attention span issues? 

When I tried going back to school a few years ago, I knew it was an issue, and attempted medicating, but that didn't really help. I didn't want to admit how little it helped, for fear that was evidence it wasn't really the problem at all. Really, I think the problem is that medication is overrated in many cases. It just doesn't do all that much, in my experience. 

I enjoyed taking it though. It didn't do much for learning calculus, but helped me enjoy video games more and the like. It helped me give up caffeine, which I'm now thoroughly addicted to again.

I haven't been on the Adderall since I dropped out. I don't think it's a good idea, at least not in my case. Some more recent reading I've done on ADHD and "rejection sensitivity dysphoria" has lead me to suspect the disorder might be much more pervasive than I'd previously understood, and in turn, taking a stimulant simply isn't going to address most of the problem.

Surely, ADHD doesn't explain my abject failure at life, right? My inability to do much of anything, socially, vocationally, or even recreationally? It might be a big part of it, compounded by GHD.. 

For one thing, it actually does explain why I refer to myself as a failure. Turns out that's a typical conclusion people with ADHD come to about themselves. I have so much difficulty engaging with anything that I've failed at almost everything I've tried and learned to stop trying, so that I fail more than ever, and this is all too common.

It's also fitting that upon finally crawling out of my shell after all these years, I've heavily gravitated towards something as viscerally engaging as combat sports. RSD explains why I was so devastated being told I wasn't in good enough shape to be competitive. I loathe putting myself in any position to be judged. Only doing it when I expect positive results, when I typically expect the worst. What a catastrophe when my neurotic fears are confirmed.

I've been working harder than ever, but still haven't recovered from that whole debacle. I'm still looking forward to beating the shit out of the coach who did that to me, but for some reason he doesn't like sparring with me. Hah. I might be trying too hard to prove myself, despite getting sick or injured again every few weeks. 

Maybe I am too old. My body's been going wrong at every turn lately. Maybe it's the loneliness, undermining my immune system, defenses, and common sense. I feel like I've aged twenty years in the last two. Maybe its pandemic related, or just my 48 year string of bad luck.

ADHD in its more serious clinical forms has a lot of overlap with autism. So much so that it could be considered 'on the spectrum,' and overlooked for sounding like an inadequate explanation. It can cause lots of failure, social isolation and alienation, especially in combination with having an endocrine disorder that sows lifelong feelings of inferiority like GHD. I looked 14 until I was 35. I avoided my peers entirely because of how small and immature I felt compared to all of them, as I fell only further behind on all the grown up things I wasn't doing. This severely compounded the problem. I spent my whole life hiding.

Now I'm out in the world again, and it fucking hurts. I'm not like other people - not because I'm special, but because I'm malfunctioning. Disabled. Inadequate. Old. My social anxiety doesn't come out of nowhere. It's an all too reasonable consequence of this reality. 

I'm making progress, but it never feels like enough. No matter how I try, I can never catch a break. Nothing ever works out, but I keep getting older. Everything just keeps getting worse. I'm afraid life has already passed me by, but what can I do but keep trying.