Tarale @Tarale@aus.social

Doing another #introduction to pin as some things have changed.

I'm Taryn, I live in Adelaide, and I'm a stay-at-home mum with a toddler. I'm very tired.

When I get time, I like to draw cartoonish pictures with semi-realistic features. I also like to make things. Sometimes I like to play games.

I'm cis, probably ace, and recently diagnosed with ADHD and autism. She/her, I guess.

Mr 4: “I’m a spud potato!”
Us: “a potato potato?”
Mr 4, incandescent with rage: “NO! 😡😡😡😡”

🤨

“You’re a shit person!”

“Wow, tone down that overreaction to being called a shit person!”

I love that thing where people trigger your Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria and then trigger additional RSD by criticising you for your RSD.

So, I give up. I tell him goodbye.

And now we will probably never speak again, because my RSD heard that I am too horrible to be friends with. He said he didn’t mean it that way, but he didn’t say anything to contradict it either so maybe my RSD is right but it definitely made it worse.

And this is why I have trouble keeping friends. Because shit like this keeps happening.

He tells me he has been going through a bunch of things, I tell him I wouldn’t know because he doesn’t tell me anything any more.

He tells me that he hates my toxic behaviour and that I am too exhausting for him, and I hear “it’s over”. I know, as soon as I’m told I’m toxic, that nothing I do will help. Everything I do will be “toxic”, telling him I was isolated was manipulative, every word proves his point.

I unblock him a while later after I’ve cooled down and the conversation restarts, but it’s more about how I always take things the wrong way, and more about how my husband is difficult.

I just want to know if he is even still my friend. My RSD is definitely up now because I keep asking, and he keeps refusing to answer or say anything reassuring at all.

He says no to the games, he says no to anything social with us. He later claims he didn’t know that was what I was asking. He also launches into an attack on my husband’s character as his reason for not doing anything social with us.

I can’t handle it, and I block him after he doesn’t take my other hints that I don’t want to have that conversation.

Every single week we were supposed to do this games thing, and every single week my husband would get sad and angry that this friend wouldn’t show up.

So finally, I thought I’d ask him again if he was going to ever play games with us. Heck, if he was going to do ANYTHING social with us again. Stupid move.

He continued to reject social invitations, just to play games online with my husband and I. Just over and over for weeks.

He also told us the group chat that we had all been in for years was too much of a pain in the arse for him and he hated the software and he refused to use it any more.

All of it felt like further rejection. More “you’re too hard for me and I won’t bother with you until you get with my program.”

Whether he intentionally meant it that way or not, he was saying I needed to change before anyone would include me socially in anything again. That I wasn’t worthy of friendship the way I am.

Of course, when I reacted that way he got mad at me for taking it the worst possible way, so now I’m not even sure if my response was rejection sensitive dysphoria or what. In any case it set the stage for future RSD.

Anyway, I reached out to a friend because we’ve been isolated. We’ve been trying to do something socially with this friend for a long time, but it keeps falling through.

I first reached out about a month and a half ago, asking about this, and his response was a precision strike on that weak spot.

I’m not invited to anything because I’m too anxious. I panic when plans change. I’m too hard to accommodate as a parent of a ‘special needs’ child. I’m just too hard.

And it turns out, criticisms of things that are very much tied to your neurodiversity, that you may not be able to *ever* change, and that you’re only just learning how to deal with. You almost certainly will never get rid of them but you’re only just learning how to reduce their impact.

So I stop telling people about my life, because all I do is “complain”, and I don’t want to burn out my friendships. But even then, on a long enough timeline, it doesn’t seem to stop the inevitable criticisms.

Criticisms of things you’ve been trying your entire life to work on. Criticisms of the things that you already hate yourself for.

Before the diagnosis it’s just you not trying hard enough to work on your anxiety or depression or whatever.

And after the diagnosis, it’s you using the diagnosis as an excuse for everything.

But either way, it seems to wear out other people. Accepting you as you are is fine, for a while, but then they don’t want to hear it any more.

Pretty sure I just burned yet another friendship to the ground in a fit of rejection sensitive dysphoria following a bunch of criticism.

I think what happens with people is they get fed up with my life being nearly constant drama or struggle. A lot of that has been due to undiagnosed neurodiversity, and then unsupported neurodiversity. But it exhausts people. They seem to think you’re not trying hard enough to overcome it.

current level of “I have no money”:

I gave everyone a haircut today. I’ve never really done haircuts before.

It’s a particularly cruel narrative trick that the Cait Sith 2 thing happens RIGHT BEFORE the Aeris thing, at least when you’re a 4 year old and, hey, we just said goodbye to Cait Sith and it was sad and oh, oh wait, LOOK! Hey it’s Cait Sith! Why aren’t we doing that with Aeris, mum? WHY ISN’T THERE AERIS 2, MUM?!

Key quotes include:

“I want Aeris 2! There was Cait Sith 2!”
“STOP IT”
“FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT FIX IT”
“Go back to the start of the game! Now!”

Mr 4 has passed that important rite of passage in a young weeb’s life where Aeris dies and she’s not coming back and you have to do half an hour of screaming about it.