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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.
Crazy to me that within neurodivergence there are wildly different experiences at play here. For me at least, degradation isn’t a slow thing, it’s total black and white. If I don’t talk to you in a while, you’ve 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 can’t. When I’m asked why I literally throw my hands up and ask “what am I supposed to say?” How life’s been going! Ok but I can’t just dump that on a stranger, vulnerability like that ain’t a light switch it’s like turning the power back on in Jurassic Park.
Meanwhile I’ve been told my whole life “if you want to talk we’re here” 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 it’s like I’ve never met these people in my life.
Which translates to “I have to maintain an impossible level of energy and investment and do all the work keeping communication going otherwise this whole thing dies.” Which is exhausting, if we only communicate over distance. And yet. I’ve lost friendships with the understanding that if I did not keep texting first, we would never interact. So the paranoia ain’t wrong.
