The Axe Over My Head

RSD, Praise, and the Fear of Being Misunderstood

The Fear Has Three Faces

I finished it. And before I could feel anything clean about that, three different fears arrived at once, and they don’t even want the same thing.

The first one is easy to name. RSD. The axe that drops the instant something of mine becomes visible to someone else — not proportional to quality, not evidence-based, just there, waiting at the door between private and public. Someone could criticise this and it would land like a verdict on me, not on four rooms of writing.

The second one is stranger, and it took me longer to admit it’s real: I’m afraid of the praise too.

It’s the happy birthday feeling. Everyone singing, all eyes on you, and every cell in your body wants the floor to open up and take you somewhere else — not because you don’t want to be celebrated, but because being looked at, directly, all at once, is its own kind of unbearable, completely separate from whether the attention is good or bad. Praise does that. A single “great work” from someone whose opinion matters lands like a spotlight snapping on, and for one full second I feel exactly what I felt on every birthday I’ve ever dreaded — seen, singled out, pinned in place by attention I didn’t ask to be the center of.

And underneath that same second, something else lands too, heavier, arriving in the same breath: now I have to be that again. Now there’s a bar, and I didn’t set it, someone else did, in one sentence, and I don’t know how I got there and I don’t know how to get there on purpose next time. I felt seen and I felt cornered in the exact same instant, from the exact same sentence, and I don’t get to only feel one of those.

That’s the part that doesn’t make sense from the outside. Praise should feel like relief. It feels like relief and a weight landing at once, and I’ve never found a way to take the first without the second arriving right behind it.

The third one is the one that’s specifically mine, the AuDHD one: I’m afraid of being misunderstood more than I’m afraid of being disliked. I could survive someone hating or praising this. What I don’t know how to survive is someone reading four rooms I built out of my own actual architecture and coming away with something that isn’t what I meant — flattening it, missing the part that mattered, turning something I sensed and tested and rebuilt three times into a take that never touched what it actually was. That’s not rejection. That’s worse. That’s being seen and gotten wrong at the same time, which somehow hurts more than not being seen at all.

I notice it happening right now, in this. The more afraid I am of being misunderstood, the more I explain — building the fence a little higher around every sentence so nothing can slip out sideways and mean the wrong thing to someone. It’s the same thing movies started doing somewhere around the year 2000, when they stopped trusting an audience to feel a scene and started narrating the feeling for them instead. Over-explained. Under-trusted.

My dad told me once that the best thing you can do is keep a few good mysteries about yourself, let people find them on their own — because what someone discovers for themselves means more than what you hand them. I think about that every time I publish something. Am I leaving room for anyone to find their own way in, or am I so afraid of being gotten wrong that I’ve explained the mystery right out of the room before anyone got the chance to sit in it?

I don’t know the answer. I notice I just spent a whole paragraph trying to make sure you wouldn’t misunderstand this one either, and I feel it deep down. RAW.

Here’s the paradox, and I don’t think it resolves: I want to be read. I want to be understood. And every single door that leads to either one also leads through a version of me that might get hurt by it — hurt by the criticism, hurt by the praise, hurt by being misread even by someone who liked it. There’s no direction I can send this piece that doesn’t walk past at least one of the three.

I’ve been here before. I said once that I’d rather hurt because I loved than not feel it at all — that the mark it leaves is proof something true happened, not evidence I should have stayed guarded. Publishing isn’t so different. The hurt on the other side of any of these three doors isn’t a sign I shouldn’t have opened it. It might be the same kind of proof.

Knowing that doesn’t make any of them lighter. It just means when I hit publish, I’m not managing one fear. I’m managing three, and they don’t take turns — they can all show up in the same five minutes, sometimes over the same sentence, someone loving the wrong part for the wrong reason and somehow that stings almost as much as someone hating it outright.

I don’t have a way to close this cleanly. That might be the most honest thing about it.

The work is done. It’s good. And I still have to walk it past all three doors to find out if any of that was ever going to matter to the part of me that’s afraid.

Why I hit publish anyway

Two years ago I noticed what my own wiring was doing to me. Left alone, my conditions and my anxiety weren’t neutral. They had a direction. They were aiming me at isolation, quietly, one avoided thing at a time, and I could see where that road ended if I let it drive.

So I made myself a promise. Four times a year, minimum, I push past the edge of what feels survivable. Not because it stops being hard. It’s never once stopped being hard. Because the alternative was letting the fear pick where I live.

I’ve sat alone at conventions with no one to sit with, on purpose. I started a book I didn’t know how to finish. I go and I people-watch in places where being alone is its own small exposure. And now I publish the inside of my own head to strangers, four rooms at a time, knowing all three doors are standing there every single time I do it.

None of that means the axe doesn’t drop. It drops. Every time. RSD doesn’t check my track record before it fires, and neither does the fear of being praised into a corner, and neither does the fear of being read and gotten wrong. They’re not impressed by the fact that I’ve survived this exact feeling a dozen times before. They show up fresh, every time, like it’s the first time.

But I’m not asking them to leave anymore. I’m just not letting them vote.

That’s the whole promise, really. Not that I’ll stop being afraid. Just that four times a year, at minimum, I do the thing anyway — and this counts. This is one of the four. Maybe more than one.

The work is done. The axe is up. I’m hitting publish.