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This.
This is why people who stay in my life are neurodiverse like me!
this!! I swear I lost like all my friendships bc of this, like I had a group of friends in hs that one day I realized βhuh I havenβt talked to this people in a whileβ and popped in to say hi and they were all awkward?? because they hadnβt seen me in a while?? and thatβs when I realized that friendship works different for them?? I was like yeah I havenβt talked to you in like four months but itβs not like Iβve forgotten about y'all why would anything change, and they were all like we havenβt talked to you in four months why are you here again acting like nothing happened? and it was really confusing for me
YEAH! THAT!
Also I have a thing where I just put the people on pause. If I donβt see them or contact them, my brain kinda put them in stasis. I donβt think about them nor misses them, and I stay on what I last knew about them (how they look, what they study/work). So when we meet again Iβm like βwait, youβve aged?β and I have the same familiarity with them thanI had before.
Anyway all my mutuals I havenβt messaged in forever - this is why
oh my gods this makes so much sense??? there are people who i havenβt talked to at all for literally over a year and weβll pick up like nothing happened, but for their people itβs just likeβ¦β¦ falling apart but onesided???? i think weβre still on the same level but actually weβre strangers??
Ohhhhhh
OHHHHHHHHHβ¦.
Ok but listen, on the other side of this, as a person who moved hundreds of miles away from everyone i knew and then became a hermit for several years, it was SUCH A FUCKING RELIEF to get in contact with an old friend and have him be like, βmy friendship levels do not degrade, so in my mind we are still awesome close buddiesβ and i almost fkn cried. I thought he would be mad or would have moved on because i had slacked on my reaching out to him and staying in touch and doing all the friendship things. But NOPE. 800 miles of distance, depression, and life changing circumstances didnt steal our friendship and i am SO GRATEFUL.
#came back to tumblr after four years #lottie and I immediately went like that spiderman meme yknow tags via @rudjedet
I have literally no friendship degradation whatsoever. I will not have spoken to someone for 5 years or more, and theyβre still as much a friend to me as if I had only seen them yesterday. Iβm just very bad at communicating if someone is not in my direct orbit. So when Sonja reappeared on this site I basically screeched into her notes like a banshee because I was delighted and we picked straight back up where weβd left off.
Happy to go on the record that I donβt expect regular contact and will welcome hearing from people after a long time
Holy shit, I didnβt actually realize this was a Thing.
Crazy to me that within neurodivergence there are wildly different experiences at play here. For me at least, degradation isnβt a slow thing, itβs total black and white. If I donβt talk to you in a while, youβve basically become a stranger to me. I have to re-learn how to interact with you based on how you yourself have changed.
Like, my sister can maintain relationships with our relatives across the country. I canβt. When Iβm asked why I literally throw my hands up and ask βwhat am I supposed to say?β How lifeβs been going! Ok but I canβt just dump that on a stranger, vulnerability like that ainβt a light switch itβs like turning the power back on in Jurassic Park.
Meanwhile Iβve been told my whole life βif you want to talk weβre hereβ ok but 3k miles and 3 hours time difference make you totally out of sight out of mind. In the room with them? All is fine. On the phone however and itβs like Iβve never met these people in my life.
Which translates to βI have to maintain an impossible level of energy and investment and do all the work keeping communication going otherwise this whole thing dies.β Which is exhausting, if we only communicate over distance. And yet. Iβve lost friendships with the understanding that if I did not keep texting first, we would never interact. So the paranoia ainβt wrong.
