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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 “huh I haven’t talked to this people in a while” and popped in to say hi and they were all awkward?? because they hadn’t seen me in a while?? and that’s when I realized that friendship works different for them?? I was like yeah I haven’t talked to you in like four months but it’s not like I’ve forgotten about y'all why would anything change, and they were all like we haven’t 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 don’t see them or contact them, my brain kinda put them in stasis. I don’t 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 I’m like “wait, you’ve aged?” and I have the same familiarity with them thanI had before.
Anyway all my mutuals I haven’t messaged in forever - this is why
oh my gods this makes so much sense??? there are people who i haven’t talked to at all for literally over a year and we’ll pick up like nothing happened, but for their people it’s just like…… falling apart but onesided???? i think we’re still on the same level but actually we’re strangers??
Ohhhhhh
OHHHHHHHHH….
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, “my friendship levels do not degrade, so in my mind we are still awesome close buddies” 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 they’re still as much a friend to me as if I had only seen them yesterday. I’m 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 we’d left off.
Happy to go on the record that I don’t expect regular contact and will welcome hearing from people after a long time
Holy shit, I didn’t actually realize this was a Thing.
I…actually love it. It’s rockiest I think in your early years - teens, twenties, when most of your friends are forced through proximity (school, the trauma of early workplaces) which is when the friendships you make are sometimes least likely to be the ones that last.
But as you get older and ideally meet more folks like you, who also have no friendship degradation alongside shit object permanence, suddenly you gain friends and chosen family who are just as enthused to see you after years as you are them. Who can pick up friendships out of nowhere. I have friends I can go ‘oh god I’m sorry I forgot you existed for 6 months let’s catch up!!’ and they text back 'SAME BRO let’s do it’ - and then we might see each a ton all at once, and then not at all, for two years.
Some types of social media help. The kinds where you can heart react and leave little tiny soft acknowledgements and send little pebbles (videos) to let them know you are sometimes thinking of them at the most random times. But otherwise, one day, you will start meeting people who can not only handle this, but are fine with it. Amazingly, not all of them will be neurodivergent like you. Some of them will just be fine with the comets who shoot by in their lives, because they understand that not everyone is designed to stay permanently in one place.
And that’s not so unusual really, is it? Maybe you’ve just been made to feel like there’s something wrong with you, by people who weren’t able to be strong enough in themselves to acknowledge it was an incompatibility of friendship and not something to be shamed for. All kinds of neurotypes have family overseas who they hug and love freshly again even after not seeing each other for years, family friends or neighbours who they catch up with like no time has passed when they move back from years of studying overseas. This idea that this is a 'neurodivergent only’ phenomenon isn’t quite true either.
Of course some people will never understand. Those people might never move overseas to study in the first place, or they might never connect with overseas family, or they might forget their childhood neighbours and family friends. Okay, we can leave them to it, they’ll find the friendships and people they’ll need too!
And we’ll find so many that we need too, and it’s a lovely place to be, to find the folks who not only understand a lack of object permanence + lack of friendship degradation in friendships, but the ones who go 'same bro!’ and suddenly you remember that oh, yeah, it’s different now. I know the best people, actually. And it’s always like greeting a long-lost friend at an airport when it happens, instead of a guilt and shame fest. And what a lovely phenomenon it is we get to experience, when we make it through to the other side.
