Apologies, I did write a response but closed it without sending because I wanted to rethink something but never came back to it
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Sorry this email is so long; my ability to predict all the ways you might misinterpret every point I make turned each sentence into a paragraph of explanations.
Dont forget about the rewriting and oscillating between essays with a biblical word count or a single sentence once you DO eventually get around to coming up with a response :(
I didn’t have the right amount of energy to overcome the social anxiety answering the message until now
I have couple emails living rent free in my head for about a year....
I either wrote the reply right after I see it or never, nothing in between.
Oh God I'm so bad at this. Avoidant autism, fear of being perceived, ADHD and anxiety means years have passed and I still have messages to respond to. I bet my family in Europe hates me by now :(
If I see an email chain I know I can't just read one and walk away, I'll need to read the whole damn chain of emails and it feels like too much of a commitment so I often won't open those.
I don't have notifications for how many total, but I have many thousands of unread emails across 4 accounts spanning back 25 years. Most are in the spam folder of my oldest account, but several hundred were important and I just missed them after not checking for weeks, or I just didn't care enough to open.
I guess I'm a messaging perfectionist, my unread count is almost always 0 once per day. I even scan my spam directory regularly to see if anything valuable is hidden.
Reading? Yes. Answering…. “Later”
I do that too, but I get maybe 2 emails a day on average, and probably not even 1 per month that needs a reply, so it's not like it's a lot of work.
Painfully true for me.
Decent. Emails are read (or sent to spam) quickly, but responding is put off. Separating reading from responding helps me, somehow. But, I can't put it off too long. Having more than one page of emails to deal with gives me anxiety. Things are moved to various folders once they've been handled. So I'm basically treating the inbox as an inbox.
Looks at my thousands upon thousands of unread mails
If they'd want their emails to be noticed they better stop spamming and only send truly important emails.
More seriously, I've noticed that most people have completely disregarded any prioritization of information so absolutely every single group chat or mail group primarily devolves into random chit chat level of information sharing. So my brain just completely disregards the whole group as irrelevant after I've opened 10-20 mails/messages and turns out those weren't important.
Pretty good with email, lotsa rules. Phone calls, whole different game.