Idk I just work here

She/her. Neurodirgent queer. I don't really have a clear plan for how to use this blog, or a strong desire to say anything in particular, I just want to look at cool things.

[sporkess]

Imagine this.

You are sixteen. Your mother is dead, and you miss her so much it hurts and you are not allowed to talk about her. You have started to think you might be sick in the way she was sick. You are not allowed to talk about that either.

You do stupid, terrible, dangerous things. The stupid, terrible, dangerous things might ruin your life but that doesn't matter; you can't imagine living to thirty anyway. Most days you can't imagine living to eighteen. You keep doing them.

Then there is hockey. Of the things you have that make you feel alive, hockey is maybe the only one that is not stupid or terrible, and is dangerous only in ways that everyone says is okay. And you are so so good at it and maybe just maybe it will be the thing that gets you out, gives you a chance at something new. And you are so so good at it, the best.

The best even when you don't try.

Hockey is starting to feel boring.

Then your coach shows you a tape of a boy your age, in a different country, who they say is better than you, maybe. Someone you have to beat.

You watch every piece of tape your coaches will find for you.

Then you go to Canada. You are facing this boy on the ice. You watch his team practise from the stands and it is even better than the tapes. You want to play him so badly. You want to win.

And then he introduces himself to you. He shakes your hand and he is so polite and you can't stop staring at his freckles. You have watched so much tape of him and you never knew he had freckles.

When he walks away you can't resist insulting him so he will turn around and look at you again.

Your team beats his and you insult him again in the handshake line just to watch him glare.

Then there is the draft. You beat him there, too. You have got what you wanted; you are getting out. You will be moving alone halfway across the world to a city you know nothing about where you will have to speak every day a language you have only been learning for two years.

When you are too excited and scared to sleep you go to the hotel gym and this boy is there. You sit on the stationary bike next to him and press the speed up higher than him and he presses his speed up higher still and so you do the same until at the end you are both sitting on the floor of the gym together after midnight.

He tells you Boston is a good city to live in.

You give him your water bottle and you can't not watch his mouth as he drinks.

You need to see him again. You see him at another juniors game and he beats you this time so you need to see him again, need to take it back. You are both booked for an advert, shooting on separate days; you need to see him. You suggest a joint shoot, and they agree.

In the shoot you're meant to glare at each other but you both keep laughing. Then you tell him he looks pretty for the shoot and he blushes while he calls you an asshole.

You ask him for his room number. He gives it.

He is scared about what this might mean, but he trusts you. For some reason, he trusts you.

You can only see him a few times a year. You learn that he is funny and awkward and a little mean sometimes and that he is so afraid of losing everything. You learn that hockey is like oxygen to him and that he does not know how to not push himself to his limits.

You can only see him a few times a year. You see him on the ice and every time you push yourself to win because if you can beat him it is the best feeling in the world. You are the only person who can win against him like this, and it makes him furious and it makes him obsessive and you love that you can make him crazy like he makes you crazy.

You can only see him a few times a year. If this ever gets out you could be killed and he could lose the thing that gives him oxygen, so you don’t have photos and you don’t have labels and you can’t stay the night. Sometimes you try to drive him away because you are stupid and terrible and he is perfect and you will ruin him and you are so so scared that one day he will realise this and leave. Sometimes you want to beg him to stay just a few minutes longer.

You can only see him a few times a year. Somehow, he keeps trusting you. Somehow, he doesn’t seem to think you are stupid or terrible.

You can only see him a few times a year. Everyone thinks you hate him. When you see him injured in front of you they won’t even tell you if he’s okay. If he isn’t, no one will tell you that either. Playing against him is the best you have ever felt and you wonder if it will ever happen again.

You have said that if it is true we have always been together, maybe it is just PR to call it a love story. Maybe we were just horny idiots who didn’t give a shit about anything else. Is not true.

You have said that if it is true that it is a love story, then there must be a time when the rivalry changed, when we stopped pushing to win. Is not true.

There was no point when it was casual.

There was no point where we stopped competing.

Fuck you.

[gatesofminrathous]

there will never be anything as funny as the mutual disbelief between long form and short form fic writers about each other's style.

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

meanwhile long form writers look at people writing 1000 word one shots like god I would cut off my left nipple to be able to say anything concisely. i would love to play with multiple ideas. free me from the shackles of this child I have birthed. i love them but I now must take them to t-ball and doctor's appointments and they're going to destroy everything I own.

[sporkess]

Tragically relatable content.

[sporkess]

Elevator SequelSequelSequelSequel (this is legitimately the working title) has hit 32k and is still less than 3 weeks into the 2019/2020 season.

Apparently I still haven't figured out how to be concise!

[headspace-hotel]

I am learning to imagine the future:

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

I am learning to imagine the future. There is a crack in the wall of this prison, of this machine, of this darkness, and through it, I see a tree.

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

[headspace-hotel]

today

[penandinkprincess]

I agree with you about Captain Shane. Ilya is the one giving everyone forehead kisses and telling them they did a good job and Shane is like “have you guys tried, I don’t know, scoring goals??”

and like to be clear, i don't think shane is a *bad* captain.

i just think he is very focused, game-oriented captain. i think he expects a lot of the team, but i think he also behaves in a way that makes it clear that he doesn't ask anything of anyone that he himself isn't already giving. if you are struggling with something, he's going to notice it (because he can read hockey like a book he wrote himself, and he knows exactly to what level everyone *should be* performing), and if you are genuinely wanting to get better at it, 100% i think he'll work with you even if it means staying long at practice. he wants this team to be the best possible team it can be. he expects excellence of his team, but he also expects excellence of himself. i think he would sometimes struggle with frustration when someone just isn't Getting It because it clicked for HIM so what is YOUR problem, but unless someone catches an attitude about it, i think he would be able to restrain himself (for the most part) and just keep pushing.

and i don't think his team would *dislike* him for this, per se. yeah it's intense and he's intense, but it's an intense that has them all playing better and winning cups and being a fucking FORCE on the ice. and we see that he is funny around them! it's prompted by hayden getting playful first and pulling him into it, but i don't think they JUST think of shane as a robot who plays hockey like a beast. yeah cap can be brutal in practice, but he's in the trenches with them and he can lighten the mood with a comment after it's over and they're back in the locker room.

BUT i do think that this relationship does then hinge ENTIRELY on shane continuing to perform and turn out the excellence he demands of others. there isn't as much of a team spirit of friendship as there might be on other teams, and this is fine UNTIL you have a situation like homophobes on the team already now having a problem with shane being gay and now there is suspicion that he has lapsed in his excellence and dedication.

everyone is entitled to their own personal #myshane, but i do get a little mmmmmmmm when there's no acknowledgement of all about how part of the problem with how montreal ended up is with the fact that enough of the team had a problem with shane being gay that they were then SO fast to jump on the suspicion that he'd fucked up after YEARS of diligence. and shane is very self-contained and doesn't reveal much of himself to a lot of people, but i'm also like?? with how him being gay was received by this team he's given YEARS of his life to?? tbh thank god he didn't come out to them as a group earlier.

and i do think that there is room for him to grow in being able to find a better balance on viewing teammates as friends vs teammates because i think that would make the game more enjoyable for him in a way i don't think he's let himself experience it in a long time (and understandably so! he's the first asian captain in nhl history! if his team DIDN'T demonstrate excellence, 100% it's getting blamed on him. he loves hockey, but so much of his experience as a pro has been "you're the best at what you do, but you also HAVE to be the best because you are The Example whether you wanted that or not." and i also think there's room there to think about how shane would be so fucking hyperaware of not coming across as too soft on his team in a way that maybe sometimes overcorrected him into being a little too strict.)

tl;dr: i think shane is a very *intense* captain, but i don't think that automatically makes him a *bad* captain

[sporkess]

💯

[jimmysownworld]

i love the “hollanov has a crush on carter vaughn” take not necessarily in a “i think they would invite him to watch” way but more in a “ilya would accidentally let it slip while chirping at shane to fluster him that vaughn is at the top of their ‘would’ list and vaughn is a little thrown off and straight so he’s like “are you guys asking?” and ilya laughs and pats his shoulder and assures him “absolutely not, i do not share my shane, we just think you are good looking man, i like that you are pretty and fun and my shane likes that you are serious about hockey and have good grooming habits. is not serious, do not worry vaughny we will not be asking you to witness me and my beautiful husband ever” and vaughn low key is overjoyed about it, his teammates who are around and hear the exchange are sometimes like “that doesnt bother you? you dont find that a bit weird?” but vaugh genuinely is just like “rozanov just called me pretty and fun enough to hang out with and hollander thinks im good at hockey and clean enough for him, you could hand me a nobel peace prize and it wouldnt come close to this achievement” and eventually it gets out to the general public so vaughn is captioning his instagram posts shit like “#1 contender for being the hockey husbands third goes fishing” despite shanes mortification about this getting out and vaughns clear delight with it” way

[jimmysownworld]

carter vaughn laying on his stomach near the center of the ice on the admirals side kicking his feet and holding his head in his hands while he blows kisses to hollanov during warmups.

shane is horrifically embarrassed by this and can not meet vaughns eyes or even his body, he refuses to look at him period.

ilya laughed for damn near 5 minutes and was doubled over coughing at one point fully crying, he is delighted by this and once hes through his warmups that shane wont let him skip he skates to center ice and does the exact same thing, kicking his feet in the air, blowing kisses, little finger waves, winking at vaughn. they dont say a word the whole time they just do these actions like flirting cartoon characters stuck on loop.

the centaurs are also delighted by this, despite the knowledge that vaughn is at the top of the couples “would” list this is the incident that earns vaughnny the nickname “boyfriend” among the team. they’re playing new york? will you guys be seeing your boyfriend? new york lost the game last night? hows your boyfriend taking it? someones family member is taking a trip to new york city? hey can you guys text your boyfriend and ask for recommendations for places to eat?

the admirals give vaughn as many opportunities to drag this bit up as possible because they find it hilarious, with the exception of scott who regards this whole thing like a curse cast upon him that will last long after his death. media days are the worst for scott especially because ever since the media learn about this stupid joke they’ll get questions about it. scott any comments on the rumors that your alternative captain carter vaughn is getting between the marriage of shane hollander and ilya rozanov? he is not, vaughn does not like men. scott is there any expected tension between the admirals and the centaurs at your game next week because of carter vaughns public flirting with the couple? should the media be expecting a fight between your alternate captain and the hockey husbands? i personally dont think you should be expecting a fight if he’s flirting with both of them, but this might become a thing for hollander and rozanov and i think vaughn wouldnt mind egging it on. scott do you think your co captain has a chance of entering a relationship with shane hollander and ilya rozanov and if so how would this effect the team dynamics within the admirals? i dont think vaughnny could handle all that even if he did like men.

carter vaughn starts getting chirped at about it, if its in a homophobic way he’ll note down the name and ask for a placement from hollander and roz, and the next game he plays against that player when they inevitably bring it up again he’ll look them dead in the eyes, give them their ranking, and why hollanov wouldnt touch them with a hazmat suit on. its his second favorite thing to do, and ilya is a strong fan of this game too. this gets added to the list of reasons why vaughn is hollanovs #1 choice because ilya enjoys it so much, and privately shane delights in someone else delivering his genuine thoughts on bad hockey players with awful habits so he doesnt have to be the one to say it.

[sporkess]

This is an insane and delightful take, I love it.

[by-ilmater]

YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOU CAN CRAFT A COMPLETE SENTENCE! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOU USE THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF COMMAS! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! YOUR PROSE IS GOOD AND RIGHT! YOU'RE A REGULAR WRITER! EVERYONE UNDERSTANDS YOUR VISION!

[ilyapasta]

Send me the last hollanov fic that made you stare at the ceiling in the dark of the early morning and contemplate your life choices

Mine was @bea-goldfish’s i’ve been stuck so long (we just got the start wrong). Tuna Melt time loops. Just trust me.

Also feel free to send me your own fics that made you stare at the ceiling. I certainly stare blankly at the wall when I’m writing my own as well and definitely contemplate. *george costanza voice* I contemplate all the time…

Now you! (Reblog or reply or send an ask idc)

[fandoms-are-my-lifestyle]

Seconding Bea's amazing time loop fic! And not just because I spent hours betaing it 🤭

For me, I'm recc'ing @sporkess 's impeccable series It Starts in an Elevator, which has everything I could possibly want - humor, fluff, shenanigans, and most importantly, Yuna and Ilya being amazing as a duo! (No I don't have mom trauma don't look at me what). Part 7 is one chapter away from complete and I promise it is worth it!

[sporkess]

Oh! Super flattering, thanks for tagging me so I get the dopamine hit!

Mine would definitely be Deep Misunderstanding by some1_around. Not that there aren't others I've read more recently, but every time I think about that one it hits me like a truck (also made me listen to The Great Divide on repeat)

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[lucylehane]

your son is a superstar athlete, one of the most successful of his generation, and he looks like hudson williams. he never seems to date, and doesn't seem that bothered by it. after a long long period of him spending all his free time alone, he starts dating rose landry! ...and then it fizzles out a few weeks later, but he's not too bummed about it, they're still friends.

that's what's so funny to me about the finale. yuna and david were *prepared*. they were ready for their son to bring home a cute twink baker or a scruffy but handsome grad student or a massage therapist for the metros. and then he walks in with ilya rozanov 💀💀💀

[vegas2014]

thinking about the rooftop scene at the end of episode 1 and how shane views competition/winning/losing re: his relationship with control (hockey) and desire (ilya). when he finds ilya on the roof, ilya’s clearly upset and shane assumes it’s because he won rookie of the year over ilya. he’s a little drunk and very pissed when he says "all you ever do is beat me", which we know isn't true. shane's actually won the last few competitions we've seen between them (their first face-off, that game, the shot accuracy competition, rookie of the year), but that’s not the point. the point is that shane historically doesn't lose. he’s finally met his competitive match, and he’s winning professionally, but his control over his desires keeps slipping. and that’s infuriating.

so imagine you're shane hollander, and you grew up being the undisputed best on every team you've ever played on. best on your youth teams, best on your high school team, captain of the canadian world juniors' team, who you lead to the championships. and then you lose your first juniors' championship in your home country. which sucks. and then, the stupid cocky, stupid hot captain of the team that beat you is the first draft pick your rookie season. you're second, which is huge, but you're not first. you were supposed to be first. you're drafted onto your mom's favorite team. it's almost everything you dreamed of—almost. this asshole shows up in the gym in the hotel in the middle of the night and silently challenges you to a race and you tie (in the book, shane loses). you don't win. you can't win. and then he's sitting across from you and he's sweaty and panting and making small talk and making you drink from his water bottle and you don't want to take it because that would be an admission of defeat too, but he insists, so you take it. he tells you to drink more and you do. why the fuck are you listening to him? he says you'll be seeing a lot of each other. you want to climb into his lap and kiss him. you feel your carefully honed self-control start to slip. you want to hit him. the next time you see him, it's your last world junior's championship, in your hometown, and you won't lose this time. you don't lose this time. good, you're climbing back up. you're evening the score. six months later, you're shooting a commercial with the guy and of course it was his idea for you do it together. fine. you shower afterward and you're trying to be out of there before he shows up but you lose that race too. he's gorgeous and you can't stop yourself from stealing glaces at every inch of him when you think he's not looking. but he sees you. and he sees that you're getting hard just from the sight of him. another goddamn thing for him to hold over you. you want to hate him. you want to swallow him whole. another loss. he asks for your room number and you give it to him, easily. another loss. you hook up and its terrifying and hopeless and really fucking good but you don't fully believe him when he says he won't tell anybody. you're losing control. you never lose control. you finally start playing against him and it's become your mission to beat him, to regain the control he’s been taking from you. so you do beat him. you win your first face-off against him, you score a goal right after and win the game. you're ahead of him in goals scored this season. you break the shot accuracy record he just set. it's either you or him for rookie of the year. there's another guy too, but everyone knows it's really down to hollander and rozanov. it's always down to hollander and rozanov. you win rookie of the year. you're getting your control back. the older players want to do shots with you, and despite yourself, you're looking for rozanov. you find him sulking on the roof, smoking a cigarette. he congratulates you, and you politely deflect it, but he doubles down and gives you a side eye, and that pisses you off. why can't he let you have this one stupid fucking thing? why can't this one thing belong to you when everything else that was yours (your game, your body, your heart) belongs to him? and now you're all but yelling at him, and he shoots back "not everything is about you, hollander" and—god damn it—your eyes well with tears. because for you, everything is about him. no matter how hard you try, it's always about him. you're shane hollander and you're 19 and all you want is to beat ilya rozanov for good so you can get your life back where you planned for it to be. but he won't let you.

[skaraptor]

AO3 should have an Annotation Mode where you can click to view all of the author's commentary and thoughts about certain parts of the work. A little comment that says "I spent five hours researching vintage radio mechanics for this and didn't even end up using it" or "this is an ancient Hebrew literary technique!" would make my day

[sporkess]

😅 Hard relate. In my latest fic I researched how long trains take to go from Moscow to St Petersburg, researched asylum-seeking procedures in Finland and Canada, and created a brief personality profile of every random OC in my twitter fic (including which of them are mutuals and which of them would secretly have tumblr accounts.

[sporkess]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Heated Rivalry (and the books) have crawled inside me and taken over all my dopamine receptors. Hadn't written fanfiction for almost twenty years, then BAM I am suddenly filled with a feverish fannish energy.

Anyway, I have just finished uploading my fourth fanfic in a week, also the fourth fanfic in about two decades, and I feel genuinely happy and proud!

Summary: After the fanmail video leaks at the worst possible time, Shane gathers his allies and takes to social media to urgently change the narrative.

It's a canon divergence from The Long Game, and is essentially me exploring the power of fandom and the power of the internet as a space for changing and transforming narratives (for good and ill), through the medium of a very tense twitterfic.

[ladybugs-and-lilys]

Shane Hollander has consumed me—mind, body, and soul. I’ve spent hours DAYS trying to put into words how much he means to me. If Ilya Rozanov is the version of myself I let the world see, Shane is the version I keep buried behind reinforced steel and armed guards. Seeing that reflected on screen hit me like a brick.

It is both easier and more rage-inducing to see a character with your exact flaws make mistakes that are so obvious when you have context. But Shane never has the context. He operates on a need-to-know basis. Why? Because if he knows something, he feels he has to control it, manage it, fix it—and he would try to carry the burden alone. he is already at his absolute limit for how much of his life he can manage without snapping.

Shane’s whole life is a performance. He isn’t just a hockey player; he is a product of media training and immense family sacrifice. as an Asian kid in a sport that constantly "others" you, he learned early that any wrong move would get him ridiculed, so he becomes the best. so no one could say he didn't belong in the room or on the ice.

Even seeing another Asian kid on his youth team didn't help because the disconnect was already there, shane has a western last name. When you feel too "other" to fit into any circle, it changes you. You stop trying to belong and start trying to be perfect. He was raised in a vacuum of locker room talk; he repressed his identity until it was second nature to the point that when he is drafted, he doesn't know who he is outside of hockey. which is why so many people, including ilya, say he is boring. he's not he's just at his fucking limit. so when he does get a chance to be brave and sleep with his 'rival' OFC he took it. it was probably the most exciting thing he felt since he was a kid and if anyone knew what he was going through it would be ilya.

in episode 2, when shane realizes sex isn’t a drill he’s "failing" at but something actually fun, the weight leaves his chest. For a moment, his emotions aren't scripted. He falls in love because Ilya—despite his own nerves—makes him feel safe and seen in a way he's never known before. and then ilya, recognizing shane is falling hard and fast, pushes him away. and shane's heart breaks but he can't let it show.

After they reconnect, Shane tries to stay "super totally casual." He's accepted that he's mostly in love with ilya but he’s white-knuckling everything, he can't lose ilya and he can't lose hockey and if anyone found out he would lose both. Then Ilya starts changing. He texts shane more, he invited shane over before a game instead of after. He calls him Shane during sex. He makes him a tuna melt and buys him ginger ale, begs him to stay the night.

This is Shane’s nightmare. Domestic intimacy is a threat, all the feelings shane has worked to hide, bubbling up to the surface. Ilya starts to talk like he might actually want more then just sex it rocks the entire foundation of Shane's survival strategy. He scrambles to stabilize by dating Rose, not because he wants to, but because he thinks he should. He wants the "easy" path to save his career and his parents’ sacrifices. But Rose sees through him and gives him the one thing he couldn't give himself: permission to exist.

it wasn't Rose's permission that changed something inside shane but she definitely helped foster his own self-acceptance and because he's shane and can't do things 1/2 way (8 hamburgers) he went all in and invited ilya to the cottage. and Ilya does the unthinkable, mentions a future together. so naturally, Shane stays up all night coming up with ways to keep him. Now that he has the first person to truly see him—not "Shane Hollander #24"—he would die before letting him slip away again.

This is cemented after his dad catches them. Ilya gives him the space to panic while reminding him that they will get through it together. It’s no longer Shane against his own brain; it’s the two of them against the world.

I spend so much time analyzing Shane’s "neuroticisms" because i recognize the frantic, suffocating need to be perfect enough to stay. I see the "boring" mask and I know it’s actually a high-performance engine running at 200mph just to keep a neutral face. But the tragedy of Shane Hollander isn't that he was closeted; it’s that he spent his whole life believing his only value was his performance. Ilya Rozanov didn't just break into the fortress he knocked it down and made way for shane to build a home where he doesn't ever need to hide ever again. Shane didn't just find a boyfriend; he found the only person in the world who made being "just a person" feel like a promotion. He isn't boring. He’s finally, for the first time in his life, free.

[sporkess]

Love this exploration of Shane!

[hjdjdjdjdjc-deactivated20260221]

a lot of my autism masking is just making myself more palatable for other people and my therapist said "does spock make himself 'more palatable' for others?" and had me promise to keep unmasking like:

[sporkess]

Noted, filing that for future reference.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I don't know how to diversify my reader base.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

... like this?

[sporkess]

I have already read your TTOU but if I hadn't this would bring me in 😂

[myfootyrthroat]

Anything the media says that you disagree with is an obvious conspiracy, and anything they say that you agree with is clearly factual.

[hedwig-dordt]

/pic id: bluesky post from Kingfisher & Wombat @tkingfisher

"If you want to believe it, check it twice ::clap clap:: "If you want to believe it, check it twice ::clap clap:: Doesn't matter if it's awful Doesn't matter if it's nice "If you want to believe it, check it twice ::clap clap::" appended to the post from High Priestess, Low Patience user Cheriepriest.com

If the rage-bait works too well it might be fake ::clap clap:: If the rage-bait works too well it might be fake ::clap clap:: Look we've all been fooled before when a deep-fake makes us sore but kindly doublecheck your source, it might be fake ::clap clap::

/end id

[dragonflavoredcake]

Rejection sensitivity dysphoria is the weirdest ADHD symptom ever. Like hello yes my weird brain chemistry manifests as Whiny Crybaby Disorder

[eroscestlavie]

btw this is not a universally agreed upon "symptom" of ADHD and I think many people would benefit from treating it as part & parcel of ADHD's broad, foundational trait: inability to do emotional regulation. A feeling of total rejection and terror at failure is a treatable and manageable issue. For me, I found it easier to manage once recognized that the reason I was having these reactions is that like many other emotional states, I couldn't "exit" an emotional state related to feelings of rejection once I was in it.

imo way too many people are going through life thinking they're just going to be sensitive to rejection for life because of how some people (not OP, but definitely plenty of ADHD influencers) talk about this "symptom." I don't think it's terribly productive that it gets constantly cordoned off as its own thing. like a lot of ADHD, while it sucks to have it shape your life up to the point you realize what it is, it is indeed possible to exposure therapy & DBT your way out of it.

signed: someone with ADHD who used to not be able to take critical feedback from anyone every and is now a freelancer and gets critical feedback three times before breakfast. still workin on it but it's very possible to go from "whiny crybaby disorder" to "mostly functional, if slightly sensitive ADHD adult"

[grison-in-space]

I also think it's worth noting that rejection sensitive dysphoria is most parsimoniously interpreted as a trauma reaction—a learned response to a potential signals of social relationship deteriorating for reasons the ADHD person can't necessarily control. Social relationships are incredibly important to humans, and ADHD (especially undiagnosed and undisclosed) really sets us up to fail. This is especially true given that perceived social blame for stressful situations is a massive factor in transmuting stressful experiences into lasting trauma, and ADHDers are typically judged to be personally responsible for the failures that happen as a result of attentional, time awareness, or memory failures.

What conceptualizing RSD as a category of trauma response to social triggers does is allow us to treat it like any other trauma response. It pulls RSD out of the bioessentialist framework and into the realm of injuries that can be treated, learned associations that can be unlearned. It turns out that the same techniques that help with PTSD triggers, including the same damn meds (hi, clonidine), are effective for helping reduce RSD. (It also explains why RSD is also common in autistic people, who often have a similar history of social error and narratives of self blame, without requiring inherent neurological differences.)

It's a common kind of stress injury, basically. It's not Whiny Crybaby Disorder; it's more like shin splints. Getting better shoes for running, being careful about the ground you run on, and letting the splints heal properly can all help make shin splints go away when you've been running barefoot on concrete roads your whole life.