The Gift & The Curse of ADHD Sensitivity.

The Gift & The Curse of ADHD Sensitivity

Why are you so sensitive?

Stop overreacting.

You’re being dramatic.

What they mean is simpler:

please make yourself smaller so we don’t have to sit with what you feel.

If you live with ADHD, BPD, trauma, or the unholy trifecta, that chorus becomes background noise. It follows you everywhere. A cheap ringtone you can’t turn off. Eventually, you stop arguing with it. You start gaslighting yourself.

It’s not just sadness anymore.

It’s sadness plus shame for feeling it too loudly.

Welcome to hell’s funhouse, where every emotion burns twice as hot & you’re expected to smile through the scorch marks like nothing touched you.

The flavours of sensitivity hell

Emotional sensitivity.

One careless comment detonates the whole system. They say “relax,” but your brain has already edited a 12-hour documentary titled Every Reason You’re Unlovable. Clinicians call it RSD — Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I call it a smoke alarm wired straight to your nervous system, screaming every time someone exhales wrong.

Justice sensitivity.

You see the cracks. The cruelty. The hypocrisy. You can’t unsee it & you definitely can’t stay quiet about it. Everyone else swallows it. You become the twitching conscience in the room. Brave, they say. Exhausting, you feel. Necessary, even when it costs you.

Physical sensitivity.

That shirt tag isn’t “a little annoying.” It’s a war crime. Someone brushing past you in a crowd feels like an ambush. You don’t just notice the world — you absorb it. Every texture, sound, smell & micro-aggression lodges itself somewhere under your skin.

Social sensitivity.

You read tone shifts like classified intelligence, then somehow still miss the obvious. Hyper-aware & completely lost, sometimes in the same sentence. A cruel joke your brain plays on itself, over & over.

Living in a brain with no dimmer switch

They’ll tell you sensitivity is weakness.

That you need thicker skin.

That you should “just let things go.”

Bullshit.

Sensitivity isn’t fragility. It’s awareness with the volume cranked past safe limits. It’s seeing what others numb out. Smelling the rot before anyone else admits something stinks.

In a culture obsessed with being “chill,” you start wondering if you’re broken — or if everyone else is quietly sedated.

Spoiler: it’s not you.

Survival notes from the overstimulated

Regulate before you analyse. Your brain lies when it’s lit up like a crime scene.

Track your triggers — hunger, sleep deprivation, too much human proximity. None of them are minor.

Build sensory armour. Headphones. Weighted blankets. Animals pressed against your chest like living shields.

Say it plainly: “I’m overwhelmed. It’s not you.” It saves hours of silent self-destruction.

The brutal truth

Your sensitivity isn’t a flaw.

It isn’t drama.

It isn’t “too much.”

It’s the blade and the bruise.

The curse and the compass.

The reason you bleed so easily and the reason you create, resist, love ferociously & feel alive while the world scrolls itself numb.

Yeah, it’ll break you sometimes.

But it will never let you be anaesthetised.

You’ll feel every jagged edge. Every gut-punch. Every tiny spark that still survives the wreckage.

That’s the gift.

That’s the curse.

That’s the whole damn point.

Come sit with me in the dark at hopedieslast.ca.

Let’s make the unbearable a little darker, a little sharper, & maybe survivable.

With scars, shadows & unkillable hope.

hopedieslast

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