What hurts is that people treat it like I am doing this obsessive, unnecessary thing when in reality the amount I say sorry is perfectly tailored to the amount that I am randomly (random only from my perspective of course) pissing people off all the time around me with my actions. Which in practice means I say sorry all the fucking time.
Those same people that tell me not to say sorry I have pushed to the edge of their tolerance of me many times, and the ONLY thing I can do in those situations is say sorry in a genuine way. People really dont fucking understand having an intimate familiarity with those moments where someone is seriously pissed off at you and not only wants a practical explanation for why you fucked up but more importantly they need an emotional explanation that squares your apparent desire to be a good person/worker with the fact that you just massively fucked up something in a way that sure makes you look like a lazy, uncaring person. I have no agency in those moments, I am basically an 18 wheeler smashing through someone else’s life but I have no brakes and LITERALLY the only thing I can do in that moment to make the situation better is apologize simply but genuinely in a way that conveys how hurt I am by own actions too.
Of course, the ones that love me always return to their more patient selves and apologize for getting frustrated with me, but apologies mean nothing to the memory in my body of feeling like I am always sliding towards seriously aggravating someone and hurting my relationship with them. Further it is only a learned, constant input of willpower and constant attentiveness that keeps me from constantly blowing past people’s threshold of patience for me in moment to moment interaction and also in broader life contexts. An absolutely necessary survival strategy for me has been learning to constantly “manually breath” with my experience of reality so that I don’t slip back into autonomic behaviors that immediately cause friction with the environment and people around me.
Saying sorry a lot is my way of double checking my social awareness and making sure I am not missing the fact that now I am just yelling at everybody for no reason because I am excited about the conversation or something. When people react with “hey, stop saying sorry!” the consequences are they are mildly annoyed at being asked the question, but when it opens up a conversation about something I have been doing that is genuinely annoying people around me it can often be the ONLY thing that saves me and others from a lot of unnecessary suffering. It also, and I can’t stress the importance of this enough, is often the only thing that can halt someone from developing a narrative about who I am that is wildly inaccurate (I don’t care, I am lazy, I don’t like working).
The world is going to have to become a hell of a lot more accommodating and accepting of ADHD before I stop saying “sorry!” all the time and it is frustrating that people get upset at me for using a perfectly rational coping strategy in a society extremely hostile to my disability. Its like, people don’t want to see the amount of effort I have to put into not being a burden on others because it stresses them out and feels like a broken record… and sometimes I just get so angry and sad feeling like… yes that is exactly what it is like to be in my head 24/7, I am sorry you had to briefly experience that?
As a counterpoint to maybe help you see how it looks “from the outside” is that every time someone says sorry to me I have to stop my current thought process to evaluate what you are asking forgiveness for, how much it did impact me and if I am willing to forgive.
I would become a bit frustrated if this would occur multiple times over one interaction mainly because it would take so much energy to go through the whole process in my head.
This does not help you in your current situation but might give you some insight into other peoples reaction and why they seem to get annoyed at “sorry”
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.
So I’ve been reading your comments and I hear what you are saying but I kinda feel like this goes beyond adhd and into something else.
What, I’m not sure. I can only speak from my experience, but I never feel like I have to adjust my behavior for anyone else. I am unaware of time, things not directly in front of my eyes, how loud I get, yes, but no one else notices or cares about these things, or in the case that they do, they tell me.
It seems like you’re saying you are constantly questioning everything you do (correct me if I’m wrong)- and if so, that’s not sustainable, and not something you should have to be doing. That puts an incredible amount of pressure and stress on you. This would be horrible for a neurotypical person but for someone with adhd even more so! We have too many things going on in our minds already to be able to worry about stuff like that all the time on top of it!
I almost wonder if your fear about how you might be affecting others is outsized because of a traumatic experience or chain of experiences in childhood or earlier in your life?