Successfully Failing!

Failing is hard. No one likes to do it. Everyone hates it and most of us fear it. But what if failing was ingrained in you?

Horrible thought to think right?! No one would ever want to believe that. You may hear that statement and say “it’s not possible you can’t be programmed to fail” and you’re right. I don’t think any of us are programmed to fail but I do think ADHD’ers often have this sense of constant successful failing.

Not every ADHD person has this feeling and not everyone that has this feeling is ADHD. What I’m talking about is

Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria.

You might be asking what this is. Well you can search it on the internet if you want there is a lot to read about but I’ll break it down in my way. RSD is the intense exaggerated reaction to rejection of any kind. Major or slight. Actual or perceived.

I’m sure there is probably clinical ways to explain it or to deal with it. I am in no way a trained professional in any medical or physiological field, but I am extremely experienced in it. I live with it. I’m sure a medical professional could explain the triggers or diagnosis of it but the best way I can explain it is ADHDers continue to successfully fail in almost everything.

What is successful failing, well when we are taught to do something, we watch others do it, then try and duplicate it and do it the way we saw and it doesn’t work. Either we can’t make it happen the way it happens for everyone else. Or we do exactly what they do and we don’t get the same result. When you live your whole life never being able to duplicate success the same way as everyone else it takes a toll on you whether you are a positive person or not.

This can play a big roll your self esteem.  Now let me briefly state that self esteem and self confidence are two very different things.

Self esteem is a more global sense of worth

Self confidence is more related to one’s believe in their abilities and skills.

I myself am very confident that I fail! I have high confidence but low esteem. I found when talking with other people similar to me and often a lot of children. They are the same. They have insanely high levels of confidence. They will go ahead and try anything. Even if they know, they aren’t going to succeed, that they won’t be welcomed, or they won’t be able to participate the same. But boy oh boy they have confidence to just be them and do it. However if you were to ask them before they tried it if they thought they could do it, they would probably say no. I myself suffer from this, I am very confident that I’ll come to a solution but I believe that I will do it wrong or people will be upset with me. My self-esteem of what I’m worth to the process is low, but my confidence that I’ll make it out to the other side at the end is extremely high.  I think this comes from the confusion of the process of success at a very young age.

Something as simple as being taught how to tie a shoe. Often ADHDer children will struggle with these kind of “basic” skills they can’t seem to grasp the same concept or pattern that everyone else is using or they may  be able to complete the same pattern but somehow the shoelaces always come undone.

While I was thinking about this post and started writing it I started to think back on my own childhood and I distinctly remember trying to tie my shoes. My mother showed me a way. My father showed me another way. I was taught a third way at school even my brother was trying to get me to make knots,  but my laces did always seem to be undone unless someone else tied them. Eventually I learnt how to tie my shoes and still until this day I double knot them. Even though I eventually got the skill the process to get there really impacted me.

When you still get to the same end result eventually the process on how you got there can really impact you. Honestly I don’t think I could ever actually teach someone to tie their laces. I just don’t have it in me to explain or express how to get the loops the right way. I think I don’t really succeed in the process of it the same way that is ‘natural’ for most. So although my shoes are tied and I can do it myself. I still feel like I fail in shoe lace tying.

This is often the case for people with RSD and most commonly with ADHDers. It’s because we fail at steps or fail at the process and yet we still make it to the end results and we are confused. We are told its wrong and either way we fail. We either fail at the process and get the right answer or we get the right process but fail at the answer, it just seems to never be right! In school many things are taught in a specific way, you are taught a process to do something and sometimes they don’t really care about the answer. They want you to do the process a specific way to get that answer. It’s like when people are trying to do math and they tell you what is 7+6 =13 to a lot of people the process is simply to know that 7 and 6 make 13, and they teach you that they want you to know 7+6 =13. However many ADHDers (also some other neurodiverse people will do that) will do more pattern recognition. They know that 7 and 7 is 14 so we think 7 +7 = 14. We also know that 6 is one less then 7 so that means one less of 14 is 13. What we’re seeing is 7+7 is 14 Minus one because 6 is one less then 7. Ok so one less of 14 must be 13 now. The bonus of this and a perk of ADHD is our brains work faster than a Neurotypical person. I do believe  we do cognitive problem-solving a lot faster then the neurotypical. And because we are able to see multiple different variations of something we can see many different solutions to the same problem. So although we have to go through that 7 doubled equals 14 one less than seven is six one less than 14 must be 13. We do it so quickly but we do it the exact same result as an neotropical person doing 7+ 6 is 13. When we explain this to our teacher or whoever is teaching us, even though we are successful in the answer we are told we still did it wrong. so…. We successfully fail again. We do this  all the time as an ADHD.  It can become very frustrating when you are told yes you got the right answer but you got there wrong. So either we fail in the process and still get the right answer and get told that we’re a failure. Or we do the process their way and fail in the answer and get told we are a failure again.

This is where RSD really kicks into the self-esteem versus self-confidence side of things. We are very confident type of people, many of us when we see that we keep getting the correct answer learn to be confident that we’ll get it done eventually somehow. We have that faith and the confidence in ourselves to complete the project, but we also walk in with low self-esteem because we know even though we’re gonna get the same results as everyone else we’re gonna fail in the process. So at some point we are going to fail we can feel like we are going to be labelled as doing it wrong so we just feel wrong. This is a horrible feeling it destroys your esteem and that is where I think a lot of the rejection sensitivity plays a part in this.  RSD defines itself as feeling intense pain when it comes to failure and you can result in long-term dread overthinking failure or rejection.

I admit I suffer from it constantly. I will make a mistake at work even at my age at 40 and I will lose sleep for three days or four days. For weeks later it will weigh on me, this is because RSD is embedded in me and even though everybody at work doesn’t even know I failed, I know that I did the process wrong. I still got the same answer, but because I didn’t do it their way it had to have been my fault and I must’ve failed somehow. It does sit on us and there is this insane level of fear to fail, that we are expected to live with it that I think a lot of neurodivergent people live with this and don’t really realize it. I understand that there’s a lot of different divergent topics or diagnosis. I focussed just on the ADHD because that’s my theme here, but it does apply to you a lot of different things. I also have dysgraphia, which means although I am great when I verbalize and I am very skilled in speaking about my topics or my ideas but to get it down into written word is such a struggle. I love dictation as an option because I can just talk as if I’m speaking to someone and after its all done I go back and organize some of my thoughts.

This is a perfect example of how I do still succeed in writing but I have such a massive fear in failure that I actually avoided my website blog for almost 2 years. I know I can talk to someone. I know that my opinions are valued, many people have heard my speak and told me I should have a website or even write a book. Although I am confident in my skills and knowledge in speaking about ADHD I feel that I am sure I will absolutely fail when it comes to writing. This impacts me so drastically at work, I struggle with email communication or completing reports. So although I’m great when I’m reaching out to clients by Phone or chats or in person when it comes to an email follow up or and email response I’m paralyzed, and when I have to complete something in a written format once I complete it, if I don’t get a positive response on the report or if the client emails back with a question thats when my RSD kicks in. I am completely devastated, I’m fully convinced that I provided all the wrong information on the report or that the client couldn't understand a single word I typed and I feel like I should never reach out to anyone in a written way at all. Once this happens, it can sit on my mind for weeks, and it can impact all my written communication for days at a time. While I was working on this website the fear of failure was so real and I knew that even if I shared my ideas and if people liked it, it would still be wrong. It also didn’t help that when I started this blog I did what any person would naturally do when starting something new, try and learn a bit about it, I went to the internet and searched it, I read books and all the information and instructions I got about how to write the perfect blog, didn’t work for me so I felt like I failed before I even started.

I didn’t let that hold me back though. I did finally start working on it, and while I was working on article ideas about what I could write about, it actually helped me come up with more solutions to some ADHD problems I was still struggling with. I think RSD is really a huge impact with ADHDers because it starts at the same time that our basic skills and development are created. So with ADHD children when they’re creating their sense of self and they’re learning everything from a basic skill all the way up to skilled adult executive functioning. The continual addition of this “successful failure” becomes a part of how we end up, and how we process a lot of the adult world later in life.

I am glad to see that some schools and educational processes are changing and allowing to children to think differently, but I think they have a long way to go before they are successful.

One of the great perks of ADHD is that we are very skilled problem solvers. It has been stated a lot about ADHD that we are creative and able to not only think outside the box but we think outside the warehouse of boxes. I believe the best way to benefit from this is, when teaching an ADHDer a new skill. Show them what the end result you are looking for. So like the shoe lace tying, show us what it is, explain that a shoelace knot consists of the two laces being wrapped around each other and tighten, show them different ways to do it as guidance but then let them just know they can solve this issue a number of different ways. You’ll be surprised how quickly an ADHD’er can pick up a skill if we just know what the end result is and given guidelines on what is the basics required and let us just do our own thing. Bank on the skills that ADHD gives us naturally, the problem solving awareness.

I also believe that words are powerful I think that when showing an ADHDer a way its very important to say “this is one way out of many that this could be done” reassuring an ADHDer that just because you do it that way we don’t have to follow it exactly the same way. It will give them the confidence and esteem to get to the same correct solution without the pressure of doing it a way that is not comfortable.

If you already have RSD and you’re an adult, evaluate the request that is being made from you, if there is no requirement of the task to show your work process, if they don’t care HOW you do it, don’t worry if you aren’t doing it the right way. There is no right way if they aren't asking for a specific process. To help remove some of the fear of being wrong, you can always ask for a clearer understanding of what they want as an end result. Or if they have no requirements for how it would look like at the end be sure to get very clear guidelines. Be sure to have a clear understanding of specifically what they want IN the report, or what aspects have to be included. Simply be sure to understand the goals of what they want and remind yourself that if they don’t need to see the thought process to get to the end result just focus on the end result.

I do believe that RSD is very hard to overcome, I think once you are suffering from it, it may not totally go away. I do also believe that you can work with it, you can adapt to it, and you can still be successful with it.

I hope in some of my up coming blogs I can provide people with some ideas, guidelines or insight on how to work with RSD and other struggles. I hope that some of this will help you overcome some of your barriers.

Remember to Slay it Your WAY!

Sheena Shay