Any NT/mentally healthy people who would like a model of the SOME (because there are always others depending on the circumstances!) correct responses:
1. “How long is this gonna last?” “The dinner’s from now till seven, and then there’s, like, deserts and Wandering Around Talking to people around nine. The venue is DEFINITELY kicking us out by 930.”
VARIATION: “How long is this gonna last?” “I honestly have no idea - you have a time limit I need to keep in mind?
2. “How long will this take?” “Oh like twenty minutes.” *AN HOUR LATER* “Okay I swear we’re almost done - we need to drop you at home after, or should we go get a coffee or just sit in the car?” [insert appropriate wind-down or rest activity for your friend here]
VARIATION: *after twenty minutes* “Shit, this is taking longer than I meant it to - you want to go sit somewhere and wait for me? Sorry.”
3. “Hey, I know this is super last-minute, but we’re going to go do [involving time-consuming thing] - you up for it?” [and then accept “no” if the person says it and maybe try arranging a PRE-PLANNED thing for some future date so that it doesn’t feel like, if they’re not up for dropping and running, they don’t count]
VARIATION: “Heeey we just decided we want to go [involving time-consuming thing] - would you be up for it if we came to pick you up in like 30 minutes?” (Otherwise known as “if it’s not THAT time-sensitive, maybe give a buffer).
Because here’s the thing: for some people (like, oh, me) that wrench of re-planning around a sudden emergency is <i>actually painful</i>; when it isn’t painful, it’s sort of like making jumping from a huge height not-painful - you might be able to do it, but it’s super physically demanding and you’ll pay a cost for it later. Sometimes it’s worth it, but you can’t do it EVERY DAY, and it adds a definite element of Not Fun to supposedly fun things.
Think like if every single time someone did that to you, the cost to going was standing very still while someone blasted a full-volume vuvuzela RIGHT into your ear for two minutes. That’s EVERY TIME in a day that plans suddenly change, that massive uncertainty enters the question, whatever: every single time, two minutes of FULL-VOLUME VUVUZELA MUSIC RIGHT IN YOUR EAR.
Like yeah: you’re not going to die. You CAN deal with it, if you’ve gotta. But now imagine that’s already happened three times that day due to 1. your bus was ten minutes late (throwing the whole day into disorder: VUVUZELA MUSIC TWO MINUTES RIGHT IN YOUR EAR), 2. meeting that was supposed to be twenty-minutes turned into two hours (VUVUZELA BLAST TWO MINUTES RIGHT IN YOUR EAR) and then 3. it turned out something you had to have for your work project was out of stock so instead of doing what you needed to do you had to spend an hour wrangling a totally unfamiliar ordering and inventory system and reworking the next two weeks schedule and then probably doing something TOTALLY DIFFERENT that you were going to do next week that now you can’t do next week because you have to do this thing next week (VUVUZELA BLAST TWENTY MINUTES BECAUSE FUCK YOU RIGHT IN YOUR EAR).
And now your friend wants you to go out to the bar! Right now! And you like your friend. You do. You even like going to the bar with your friend.
But you cannot. handle. another. fucking. vuvuzela. screaming. in your. ear.
And your friend gets mad.
Which is like another screaming vuvuzela in your ear AS WELL AS your friend being mad at you.
And this is why people with these difficulties tend to self-isolate! Because while we’re still utterly fucking lonely and want people, there is only so much fucking metaphorical vuvuzela music we can TAKE.
(One can take this metaphor even a bit further because you know what some days you end up so surface-inured to the vuvuzela blasts that you don’t THINK they’re getting to you anymore until a) you turn around and MURDER THE VUVUZELA PLAYER and then everyone gets Upset at you, or b) you suddenly find a space where there are no vuvuzelas and burst into tears because it’s so fucking nice omg how.
Sometimes you even then have to leave that place, because you’re so USED to being hit with RANDOM BLASTS FROM VUVUZELAS that places where there don’t seem to BE any just make you fucked up and paranoid because you can’t stop expecting it but because you can’t see where it would come from your paranoid hindbrain keeps thinking “but that just means they’re hiding REALLY WELL and we have to be MORE CAREFUL” until it gets to a point where you’d rather have your eardrums broken by the noise PREDICTABLY once a week than wait in anticipation.
Which is fucked up because you would actually MOST like to just … not be screamed at by vuvuzelas but when they just go away you don’t get to enjoy the freedom you just get wound up waiting for the next blast. And this is why we do something called seeking negative stimulation, or neg-stimming.)
