Thank you for this, it's seriously been hard these last several weeks.
My SO tries to be supportive, bless his heart, but sometimes he just says the wrong thing, like this morning we had a disagreement about something, and where I was coming from, he raised his voice, interrupted me a few times and was just generally acting impatient, like he couldn't wait for me to stop talking so he could disagree with what I was saying. I don't know if that's true or if that was his intention, but that's how I took it. Instead of freaking out on him, I decided to text my mom about it, who in turn replied "you're just extra sensitive right now and taking everything more personally than usual." ... What? There's no way I'm that crazy, there is NO WAY that 100% of the time I feel like someone was being shitty, I'm just being "too sensitive." That feels like a cop out, or a way to avoid taking responsibility for upsetting me.
And you're so right, we DO fight it, so hard, all the time. I'd never been able to formulate it into as clear of a thought as this:
Plus, they don't understand sometimes just how much we fight it too. I could be WAY more reactant than I am. I could freak out a LOT more if I didn't constantly tell myself to calm down and stop overreacting. When people tell me to calm down, they don't get that I'm already at the absolute minimum level of calm I can achieve with just willpower. So we deserve far more credit and a lot less of this judgment and childlike treatment.
As soon as my SO gets home from lunch with his dad, I'm going to have him read your response here, and show him the OP.
In terms of rational replies to pull out when needed, do you have any suggestions? I wouldn't even know where to start picking the right words. I wouldn't use your exact words of course, but even just having some sort of starting point would be super helpful.
I also enjoyed the smoke allergy analogy... I've met people who are allergic to smoke, and I don't smoke around them. I am sensitive to their illness. Why can't the people around me treat me with the same amount of respect as they'd treat someone with an allergy? Like you said, you wouldn't blow smoke in someone's face if they had lung cancer or they were allergic.