Post #2882796

2026-05-25 15:30 UTC

In November of 2022, I spent three days in a psych hospital because I scared the people around me. At one point, I said that I wanted to “kill myself digitally.” I said I wanted to “die online.” People heard self-destruction. What I meant was something very different. I was exhausted from performing versions of myself that were built for survival. Versions of me designed to keep the peace. To soften myself. To stay acceptable. To stay safe. To make other people comfortable at my own expense. Enough of me had already collapsed internally that I no longer had the energy to maintain continuity for other people. And I think part of what made this so difficult for others to understand is that I had spent years appearing verbal while being emotionally nonverbal underneath. I could speak. I could socialize. I could explain things. I could perform coherence. But much of my social behavior was built around adaptation, mirroring, camouflage, conflict avoidance, and trying to maintain relational stability. Part of what complicated this further is that blindness often masks ADHD in ways people do not immediately recognize. I was not diagnosed with ADHD until I was 35. So many of the systems I built to survive socially were interpreted as personality traits instead of adaptive mechanisms. People saw intensity. Hyperverbal communication. Overexplaining. Social flexibility. Emotional depth. What they often did not see was the chronic exhaustion underneath it. (1/4)

Replies (2)

@Rosalyn@mindly.social 2026-05-25 15:30

The fatigue that comes from constantly monitoring yourself. Constantly translating yourself. Constantly shaping yourself into someone understandable to other people. And because so much of my life operated through implied social rules instead of explicit communication, many of my relationships were built around assumed consent. People assumed emotional access to me because I rarely interrupted that access. People made decisions around me, about me, or involving me without always informing me directly because I had unintentionally taught people that I would adapt around missing information. At the same time, I mirrored those same systems back at others because implicit communication had become normalized to me too. That is the part people sometimes miss. When you spend years surviving through social camouflage, ambiguity can start to feel more natural than direct communication. And I do not think I was the only person confused during that transition. When someone spends years adapting quietly, people build relationships around that adaptation. Removing it changes the emotional architecture of the relationship for everyone involved. So when I began clarifying boundaries more explicitly after 2022, some friendships changed permanently. Not always because anyone was malicious. (2/4)

Open ##3101741
@Rosalyn@mindly.social 2026-05-25 15:38

GPT citation log: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a146c39-ce98-83ea-b38e-10fb5b094890

Open ##3101744