When Feedback Feels Like Erasure

Author’s Note

The piece is informed by experiences in which feedback and institutional responses left a student both exposed and oddly invisible. For neurodivergent students, these moments can illuminate what happens when masking, shame, and systems of care collide. It considers how easily personal distress may be misread as failure.

When Feedback Feels Like Erasure

There is a particular kind of sinking feeling that happens when you receive feedback on an academic paper, and instead of critiquing your references or your formatting, the marker writes something along the lines of: “I cannot find you in this essay. You are not emotionally present.”

For a neurodivergent student, particularly one with ADHD and dyslexia, this kind of feedback can strike a deep chord of shame. I wonder how many of us have learned to survive in academic and professional spaces by wrapping ourselves in a polished academic style, using theoretical language as a mask. It is a brilliant and exhausting survival strategy. We use our high verbal and conceptual abilities to compensate for difficulties with executive functioning, working memory, reading, writing, sequencing, or emotional regulation. The theory becomes a shield that allows us to hide our subjective vulnerability in settings where we are constantly being evaluated.

So, when a tutor tells you that you are “missing” from your own work, they are bumping up against the mask. But for someone with ADHD and dyslexia, this doesn’t just feel like a critique of an essay. It can feel like a global judgment on your personhood.

Perhaps you then gather your courage and reach out to your tutor. You make a brave, specific, access-related request, explaining that you do not understand and need support to show up more fully. You do this knowing that you have a formal Learning Support plan in place, a document that explicitly accommodates additional tutorials precisely to help you navigate these kinds of processing challenges. And perhaps the response you get is a polite, bureaucratic deferral: Let’s just discuss this at your next regularly scheduled tutorial in a few weeks.

On the surface, it seems neutral. The institution operates on the assumption that tutorials are scarce resources, slotted neatly into existing diaries, and, beneath the surface, it ignores the formal adjustments you have already fought to put in place; something much more painful is occurring.

The Everyday Minefields of Mistrust

This kind of systemic friction rarely happens just once. Perhaps you ask for help navigating the labyrinth of academic forms, and an administrative assistant kindly sets up a meeting to walk you through them. But when the time comes, they forget or get pulled away by something more important, and they simply do not turn up.

I don’t want to shame the assistant here. We are all human, often stretched thin by our workloads, and simple mistakes happen. But for a disabled or neurodivergent student, these are not just scheduling hiccups. These easy, everyday mistakes turn academic institutions into minefields of mistrust and lack of safety.

In relational psychoanalysis, Jessica Benjamin  (2018) writes about the concept of the “lawful world”, a foundational belief in the value and possibility of intelligible, responsive, and respectful behaviour as a condition for our social bonds. When appointments are forgotten or support plans are ignored, that sense of a lawful, reliable world breaks down. The environment ceases to feel safe. The disabled student is almost never truly met or supported by the system’s structures.

When we are met with this chronic failure to recognise our vulnerability, it is so easy to slip into the “I’m Not OK - You’re OK” life position. We assume the institution has the power and the “OK-ness,” while we carry the defect, telling ourselves, I am so stupid for asking. I shouldn’t have made a fuss. This is the breeding ground for toxic shame, an excruciating psychophysiological affect that makes us want to hide, cover up, or disappear to avoid further humiliation.

But when the systemic failures keep piling up, when the emails are delayed, the meetings forgotten, the accommodations deferred, that shame turns into something heavier. We risk sliding into the “I’m Not OK - You’re Not OK” position, a space characterised by futility and despair. Horizontal problems like systemic disadvantage result when we simply collapse, exhausted and defeated, as the cruel absurdity of our circumstances takes over. The exhaustion of coping without seeming end eventually turns from a weariness of the body into a shrunken worldview.

We don’t scream or shout. We don’t file formal complaints. We just withdraw quietly because we are tired and do not see any change happening.

The Sting of RSD and the Burden of Education

We also have to account for the neurobiology of ADHD. Many of us navigate the world with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD), experiencing intense, emotional pain in response to perceived or actual rejection. When you combine RSD with the reality of these environmental microaggressions, the shame deepens.

A delayed email or a missed meeting can easily be explained away as “just scheduling” or a “miscommunication.” There is rarely overt hostility. Yet, the impact is deep because it systematically minimises a disability-related need, treating an access request as if it were just a symptom of personal fragility.

When an institution implicitly demands that the disabled student endlessly chase up their own support, or educate the staff about their condition, it is an additional aggression. It is a subtle form of testimonial injustice, a credibility deficit where the space for a person to speak on their own behalf and have their needs met is erased. To expect someone to patiently and articulately teach their tutors about the nuances of ADHD, masking, dyslexia, and executive dysfunction, especially when they are already feeling marginalised or ashamed, is to demand labour from someone who is already structurally depleted or overwhelmed.

The social model of disability reminds us that it is the interaction between a person’s impairment and the attitudinal or environmental barriers of society that truly creates the “disability.” The institution’s lack of education and reliable responsiveness is the barrier. Therefore, the responsibility to dismantle that barrier, to remember the meetings, to honour the Learning Support plans, and to cultivate a neurologically safe environment lies with the institution.

Keeping Yourself OK

So, how does a person with ADHD and dyslexia advocate for themselves in a system that is slow to change, without absorbing the system’s deficits as personal flaws?

Anchor in the Adult Ego State: When that familiar wave of shame or despair hits, our inner Child often wants to hide. Advocating for yourself requires consciously inviting your Adult ego state to the forefront, the part of you that is grounded in the present, capable of evaluating reality objectively. You might silently remind yourself: The institution’s missed meetings and lack of understanding are reflections of their systemic limitations, not a reflection of my worth.

Practice Boundaried Assertiveness: You do not owe the institution your trauma story, nor do you owe them a masterclass in neurodiversity. Assertiveness means asking for what you need respectfully but firmly, setting a limit on how much of yourself you are willing to drain. You can lean on the system's formal language to conserve your energy.

For example: “I am writing as a student with a formal Learning Support plan that includes additional tutorials. It would be helpful to use one of these sessions to work on this sooner, as it directly affects my ability to meet the learning outcomes.” Keep it factual. Protect your vulnerable core.

Seek External Safe Havens: We cannot dismantle systemic ableism in isolation. If the institution cannot provide a reliable, safe mirroring, it is vital to find it elsewhere. Ask yourself what support you need outside this relationship, perhaps through neurodivergent peers, supervision, or a therapist, to metabolise this experience. These relationships act as a secure base, helping to regulate the emotional toll of institutional misattunement and reminding you of your inherent value.

You are highly reflective, which means you pick up on relational misattunement very quickly. So, when the institution responds by dropping the ball on a meeting or deferring your formal support, your radar goes off.

You are not being stupid. You are simply catching a pattern of systemic blindness that the institution itself cannot, and sometimes does not want to, currently see.

The next time you feel that wave of exhaustion and shame washing over you after a missed appointment or a polite but dismissive email, I invite you to pause. Notice the familiar tug of the “I’m Not OK” script. Take a breath, and remind yourself that your sensitivity is actually an awareness of the space between what you need and what the system is currently equipped to give.

I wonder what might happen if we stopped absorbing the systemic failures of our institutions as personal deficits, and instead allowed ourselves to simply be neurodivergent, human, and perfectly OK, exactly as we are.

Sources:

Benjamin, J. (2018) Beyond Doer and Done To, Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315437699.