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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 am currently reading this with horror - mainly b/c of the timescale y’all are using. Four months? If I reach out to friends about once a year I feel like I’m doing great. I’m considering whether it would be awkward to get back in touch with someone I haven’t spoken to in eight years, just because I’ve been thinking about her lately.
I’m coming at this from the opposite approach the OP seems to. I have ADHD and I grew up with very scant experience of friendships. As a teen I found My People either online, where I could talk to them every day, or in hobbies where we only met up every couple months at events we all had to travel to. Those just were my friendships; any relationship that couldn’t survive under those conditions just wasn’t meant to be. And I found enough people who do thrive like that to make a good life for myself.
I went that way partly because I had to deal with a combo of trauma over times I presumed too much and got a stinging rejection from someone I liked more than they liked me, and a real difficulty telling who actually liked me because my emotional response was always “No of course I don’t matter to them at all” and I had to summon logic to try to puzzle out what was real and what was my brain’s bullshit. So frankly, it was kinder to myself to focus on the relationships I actually had with people who consistently connected with me than to try to constantly run after people who might or might not actually like me back.
So now that I’ve got a stable foundation of friendships that can survive the climate of my normal behaviour patterns, learning about this feels like a cheat code for helping relationships survive when I previously wrote off as lost causes, if I really want them. It’s like having an international plug adapter that can help me connect to people with a wider array of types of brain wiring.
