Navigating Arbitrary Standards with ADHD and Rejection Sensitivity
An end-of-course reflection assignment from my first completed writing course at Maryville University, submitted December 2021.
End of Course Reflection: Writing Across Disciplines
My entree into Writing Across Disciplines came concurrently with my return to university after a 20-year hiatus. In the context of a university writing class, I have had to suspend some of my instincts about what would constitute engaging writing for the prescribed purpose. These situations provided me with interesting introspections about my life, my career, and how my passion affects my productivity. Importantly, I only recently discovered that I have ADHD, which apparently means my brain works differently from 97% of other adult students’ brains. All told, the experiences of working through this class have only created more questions as to where and how I will apply myself in the future.
Before enrolling in Maryville University, the vast majority of my writing had been produced for casual, professional, or volunteer coordination purposes. When I knew that it counted for the success of a project or for the health of my community, I wrote with passion. I studied copywriting in order to sell books, make better presentations, and increase my clients’ success with fitness. My copywriting skills translated well into fundraising skills. I could tell if my writing was effective based on how many books sold or how many donations came in. In short, my results spoke for themselves, regardless of what any one person thought.
The requirements of the Writing Across Disciplines class thrust me back into states of mind I had purposefully left behind when I finished my associate’s degree in 2002. Writing for a grade according to an arbitrary set of standards that, frankly, feel rather distant from the stated written goals of the exercises, triggered a state of rebellious introspection: if I am going to complete a degree then I have to learn to measure up within academia.
The idea of “measuring up” leads me into a psycho-social space I had decided to avoid many years ago: the role of mercenary for points and approval. The Writing Across Disciplines course communicated to me that in order to gain approval, I must attempt to squeeze my passion into “templates” that defy my instinctual and experiential sense of what makes effective writing. Throughout most of this term I felt as though the theoretical idea of the capstone project, i.e. “communicate ideas through social media” stood at odds with the expected way I had to do it for the grade, i.e. “flood the zone with posts that few people will want to scroll back to read.”
However, my much more recent knowledge that I have ADHD, and with it a great deal of rejection sensitivity (RSD), leads me to a new point of introspection around my aversion to becoming an approval mercenary at the expense of real-world impacts.
My ability to get things done depends on how emotionally invested I am in the outcome. If I understand how the grading works, then I can reason with myself to create emotional investment so that I can create intrinsic interest in the work, thus I can get it done. Without emotional investment and interest, no amount of willpower can be applied to move me to get something done; this is a common feature of ADHD brains.
When I feel as though I cannot understand why I am not “measuring up”, I expect that completing a task will lead to rejection. Rejection sensitivity disorder means intense emotional pain. The expected pain overrides whatever interest or enjoyment I would otherwise have had, so generally I avoid work in which I cannot understand how I’m being judged. (Unsurprisingly, RSD sufferers also tend to be perfectionists.) In a class, I cannot avoid a task. In sum, when I feel as though grading is illogical, arbitrary, or otherwise at odds with the real-world pragmatics of the exercise, completing that task comes with it enormous emotional investment that exhausts me for days.
Now, accordingly, I have far more questions about my future as a writer and a researcher than when I began this class. How many of my upcoming classes will challenge me in this particular way? This class was the only one on my roster for the term and I feel emotionally wrecked by it, even though the actual course content wasn’t at all challenging. Can I learn to dissociate my sense of self from my grades — and if so, how do I connect up a sense of motivation sufficiently divorced from passion that will enable to me to complete assignments at all? Knowing that these are common struggles of people with ADHD doesn’t particularly help; it only tells me that I should keep going to therapy.
In conclusion, I believe the best thing I could do for myself would be to disentangle my sense of self from academic judgements. Paradoxically, however, this will probably lead to my grades falling, which may impede my ability to fully shift my career. The Writing Across Disciplines class has caused me to reconsider whether it makes sense for me to continue academically, given what I can now see more clearly about myself in terms of how my brain operates. So despite now expecting this assignment will not fit the rubric, I am going to turn this writing in as-is, as a radical act of rebellion against my own rejection sensitivity.
Thanks for reading.
