ADHD

This is definitely good tactical advice, but alas it is a tactic not a strategy.

Yeah that makes sense!

Yeah this is extremely apropos—and helpful.

Yeah this sounds about right. I’m 95% sure I have it and I can relate a lot to OP

Yeah definitely I have heard of RSD, it seems like at least on the Reddit ADHD community it isn’t really taken as a serious part of ADHD?

I definitely have RSD, but also I think people are missing the fact that I made my post in a moment of feeling grief that I think is perfectly genuine outside of the context of RSD (though it definitely amplifies it). A lot of responses were focused on explaining what I should do, or why I was wrong and I was just looking for some connection with other ADHD people who also feel like saying sorry after ADHD fuckups is actually a necessary survival skill and much more logical than people on the outside realize.

The unfortunate truth is that without meaningful change, apologies are just like excuses in that you’re trying to tell someone else that they shouldn’t feel a certain way about things you do or don’t. Which then just becomes another thing that can bug them.

I mean, I don't see apologies this way. I see apologies as an attempt to display some amount of caring that is not immediately apparent in your past actions. People aren't robots, they don't just care about whether you technically fulfill your tasks like a machine or not and no further. People are emotional beings, with mental models of other emotional beings around them that they use to inform their judgements and actions. I know it is easy to be reductive or cynical, but people really just don't care only about whether you get the job done or not. I would likely not be alive if this were the case, as countless times in my life people with power over me have decided to extend empathy to me because they decided that even though my actions were not acceptable, my intentions and genuine desire to be a good person was evident.

That doesn’t mean you should never apologize, but try to do it as a conscious action rather than blurting out a “sorry!” any time you don’t feel perfect.

Of course, but I think it is fair for me to point out how when I do blurt out "sorry" that there is a very rational reason for it. It is my way of impulsively testing for a mine ahead, and once you step on enough mines the words "oh you're fine this field doesn't have mines in it!" just start to lose all meaning.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, but this seems like you actually understand why people get tired of constant apologies and are a bit tired of them yourself.

What I am saying is that the tiredness people feel that manifests as annoyance at me apologizing all the time is actually the same tiredness I feel at constantly causing situations where I need to apologize and it really hurts when people simultaneously demand I make them stop feeling an emotion while simultaneously demanding I stop feeling an emotion (and taking rational steps to reduce the likelihood of events happening that create that emotion in me). In other words, when I annoy someone from saying sorry too much, no matter what they believe from their perspective, I know without a shadow of a doubt that this mild annoyance is a small cost to pay for occasionally heading off major conflicts and proactively defusing rising tensions I wouldn't have perceived until they were much bigger problems. This doesn't just go for my mental well being, I KNOW it applies to the mental well being of others around me because I have seen the consequences of not saying sorry proactively and while they are less common they can be catastrophic in a way that makes all those small annoyance costs trivial.

Ranting about it won’t change it.

The point of my post was I wanted to express this in a space where people might actually understand, not to rant about it as if that would change it, and honestly I am a bit frustrated that you would project that on to my posts. I think I have put a lot of care and time into purposefully not doing that.

I think people just find the tempo I have to consciously get input from the environment around me about my actions and manually adjust my behavior because of how unaware I am of time, things not directly in front of my eyes, how loud my voice is etc... repulsive and exhausting at a kneejerk level.

Many of the people that love me are mature enough humans to experience kneejerk reactions and not act on them, which I am thankful for but it takes emotional labor from them certainly.

I get what you are saying, that thought process does sound exhausting..... almost exhausting as having to run conscious mental checks on your behavior literally almost every waking moment of your life.

It seems like you’re aiming for an unobtainable goal, namely being perfectly in harmony with everyone at all times.

No you have misread me, I am aiming to survive and to do that I have to manage the social relationships around me. When my boss gets extremely upset at me for fucking up something silly and stupid up for no reason I have to manage that relationship to keep my job.

I do absolutellyyyy overthink things but it is way off the mark to suggest this is all just an obsession with ruminating over things I can’t control, the point is how I say sorry is sometimes the only thing I truly do have control over.

I want to keep my job and the only proactive thing I can do is say sorry. In order to do that I have to think about these things.

I appreciate the advice and desire to help but I have been fighting these battles all my life, I have already invested my XP into all those skill trees to the point that I can lol

Like many ADHDers, a major reason I have a goofy personality in person is basically a coping strategy designed to do exactly that.

I promise you, I equally hate having to say sorry all the time.

It doesn't matter though, because I will fuck up in an unacceptable way with someone I love or who has power over me, and I will have to manage that moment some how.

In that moment if I cannot guarantee I will not repeat a similar kind of action that created the problem again, I am left with no agency except to attempt to express the fact that it emotionally impacted me that I hurt that person with my fuck up.

I really don't think people are understanding my point here. It is so easy to say "Nobody wants to hear apologies" because it is so self evidently true, but that is precisely what makes apologies one of the most practical forms of poetry. You have to impact someone with your words when the last thing they want in the world are words.

People can handwave away everything I am saying as overthinking it or trying to manipulate people but frankly when you consider people's actual lived experiences it is absurd to claim this isn't a problem we all have to solve almost every day of our lives even if the stakes aren’t usually existential. If we were biologists studying any other animal we would quickly conclude that making genuinely impactful apologies that stay don’t overstay their welcome is one of the most important skills of social interaction in our species.

It just feels good to say the words "Nobody wants to hear an apology" because yes, every single one of us can immediately conjure the feeling of aggressively wanting action not words. That is why most of the time apologies don't work, that doesn't mean they aren't frequently our only option (that we take with a rational understanding of it being a low probability of success strategy). The cultural blindspot people have about this when discussing human interactions in the abstract is exhausting.