Sitting in a writing group meeting, knowing that you have years, decades even, more experience than the people in the room, and yet feeling as passed over as dried old turkey a week after Thanksgiving hurts. It creates grief. The never-ending spiral of “what if?” and “why not me?”. Being in a group, or on a Zoom call, and feeling as if everyone has it together except you, or worse yet, that they think you’re just a strange or “crazy” person who just doesn’t fit in, well that hurts too. And again, it causes its own grief.
I admit, when I got my grief specialist training, I never meant for it to spill beyond the narrow confines of the subject to which I was trained. My original certification is in pet loss, and my title is a pet loss grief specialist and educator. And yet, grief, a lot like those genre-bending stories, don’t fit neatly into little boxes. You got some romance in my science fiction someone might exclaim. Someone else realizes that grief creates constellations in our lives, and so pet loss might also bring up the loss of opportunities or the loss of what never was in the first place.
Now, I want to stop and note that this is not a “woe is me” or “woe is us” blog post. Not in the slightest. There’s a lot I love about my neurodivergent mind and frankly, without it, I wouldn’t be the author I am today. Would some things have been easier? Yeah, probably. But would they be as rich, or my world as fun (at least for me) to write in and read about as it is now? Nah, probably not. Because I bake my special interests and a piece of my heart into each story, knowing that these things are not finite and the world can grow, just as I grow.
But I also can’t deny that when you are neurodivergent, and especially if you have Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) that often comes along with it, that being an author can be a mighty lonely place. The Cleveland Clinic states that RSD is feeling severe emotional pain with the feeling of being rejected or being a failure, regardless of whether this feeling is perceived or actually real. It means that in an industry that often involves rejection, rewrites (edits, anyone?), and reviews there is a lot of feeling of rejection or failure or feeling like you have been rejected, when it really was never about you and the person doesn’t even know you.
Obviously talking about this would be the subject of many other blogs (Let me just update my blogs to write to do list), so let me just say this. When you are neurodivergent and live with RSD (which in itself is a form of neurodivergent mental processing), you can feel on the outside a lot, even if that isn’t the case. There are other ways this loneliness manifests, too. For example studies have shown that neurotypical people often decide within seconds that they don’t like autistic individuals, and they don’t change their minds. Imagine meeting someone and deciding within ten or twenty seconds at most that nope, you don’t like them, you don’t think they’re competent, and you don’t trust them. I can’t. And also, I think if psychology were truly self-aware, then as a discipline, it might look at that behavior through a different lens.
I guess what I’m trying to say here, as a neurodivergent author to my fellow neurodivergent authors is that you are not alone. You are wanted. You are seen. And you are welcome in the community. Of course simply saying those words doesn’t erase the very real and the very painful feelings of feeling as if you’re alone. And it’s hard to find community, especially in this era of fractured and siloed social media and dwindling in-person groups (which are also problematic for those of us who prefer not to be around a lot of people in actual in person space).
What can you do? What helps?
For me, what helps is making a list of those things that aren’t under your control. Social media algorithms are meant to reward certain things. It’s not that people don’t like your posts; it’s that they aren’t seeing them. Editors don’t reject writers, they reject stories, and it could be for many reasons that have nothing to do with your writing. They just bought a story with the same premise; they just bought several good stories and don’t have room for any others no matter how much they like them; They don’t like the tense you wrote your story in. Not even that isn’t a rejection of YOU, but rather a preference for how your story was presented. Rather like there are people who prefer noir or gothic thrillers and other people who like Hallmark Christmas Romances. I’m not saying that there aren’t people who like both, but usually those things have different audiences.
Acknowledging the feelings helps too. Being in community with others who understands helps too. And finally, understanding yourself, how your brain works, and trusting yourself helps too. And that, my friends, is a life long pursuit. If you’d like more information, I encourage you to check out the quiz so you can find out what your creative nervous system type is, which will help you understand yourself better and help you feel a little less lonely.