me: hey how long is this thing going to last
someone: haha you just want to know when you’re off the hook
me: hah
me: (actually i just need to allocate the right expectations and backlog of energy and make sure the rest of my day falls in good accordance with it so that i don’t feel time-crunched and propel myself into a hysteria because if i don’t know how long this thing lasts or when it ends i can’t possibly know when literally anything else starts and my entire life becomes an unraveled realm of anarchy with no rhyme or reason and how is that not terrifying to you)
me: hey how long will this take
someone: oh like twenty minutes
me: ok
*an hour later*
me: *clinging to every learned social skill i can think of with the desperate hope my distress and exhaustion doesn’t show*
someone: hey we’re almost done don’t be so crabby
me: *smiling* *internally screaming at this SENSELESS CHAOS*
someone: hey do you want to do [involving time-consuming thing]
me: hey that sounds fun! when were you thinking?
someone: oh we’re doing it right now
me: oh. like. now-now? like right now. like you want me to stop what i’m doing and get up and do this thing with you, suddenly, with thirty seconds of warning. now. like this second. immediately. now?
Any NT/mentally healthy people who would like a model of
theSOME (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.
So you say no.
And your friend gets mad.
Which is like another screaming vuvuzela in your ear AS WELL AS your friend being mad at you.
So there is no winning.
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.)
Also, this is why it’s super important to be honest about your plans and expectations.
I have had more than one person intentionally downplay the time-frames and other aspects of events, even to the very nature of the event, because they don’t trust that my avoidance of uncertain scheduling and certain kinds of social situations is based in a genuine prioritisation of my own, known, needs. They just think if they can trick me into those situations I’ll magically discover I like them.
It’s called “taking you out of yourself” or “bringing you out of your shell”.
Some notable examples have included being invited to dinner only to find it’s actually a party. Being told a diversion from plans would take “about an hour” when the person saying that knows full well that just driving to the diversion would take most of that time. Being told that dinner would be around 5 when the cooking doesn’t even start until an hour after that. Inviting me around for a quiet visit and then springing a pretend “spontaneous” day trip on me in the hopes I will suddenly learn to love spontaneous plan changes. And my all-time favourite Worst Incident Ever:
Being invited to visit a relative. Arriving at their house at the arranged time and letting ourselves in to find no one home, and then getting a call from them to their own home phone to say they were “just at that community centre around the corner enjoying a boot sale (yard sale in the US?) and would I like to join them? Internally doing the maths that a boot sale is a pleasant, low-stakes situation that is easy to dip into spontaneously because there’s no reason we couldn’t leave when we were ready and. Arriving at the building to discover they actually meant “hi, I’m running a political fundraising boot sale this weekend and wanted volunteers to set up AND RUN the stalls and now you’re here I can give you a list of jobs and force you into social situations with total strangers that also involve money and you have no idea how long this is supposed to last”.
I am not going to get annoyed if you say “this diversion I want to take in the middle of our plans will probably take about 3 hours out of the day”. I will be re-working my plans for the day around the timing you give me, and will be glad to be able to ensure I can, for example, pick up the groceries in the morning instead of waiting until the afternoon since the diversion will likely mean the shops will be shut. I may decline to take part in the diversion if it is important that I be able to complete my original plans for the day, but I should fucking well have the right to make that choice.
Yes, this.
People don’t do this to me, I think because anyone who talks to me for five minutes becomes pretty sure that if you DO do this to me, there is a significant chance I will outright walk away and go home, and if for some reason I choose not to do that we WILL be having a DIRECT conversation about this that will involve me telling you that if you ever DO do this again, that’s it, we’re done.
But I have come to be able to do this out of years of just going you know what? Yes. I am the Difficult, Asocial Bitch. That’s me. You are correct. IF this is beyond your ability to handle, please just … save us both time and energy.
This is not something that everyone is capable of doing! But just because they can’t tell you off – and in fact MORESO IN THAT CASE – doesn’t make it a NOT shitty thing to do.
I feel like these scenarios describe unhealthy relationships, tbh, and author(s) SHOULD be saying no/be displeased being treated this way. Not downplaying extra efforts required in this examples, but I don’t think people scheduling inappropriately is ever considered ok?
Oh I don’t disagree, but bluntly: it’s incredibly normalized in a LOT of cases. It’s sort of like how tickling someone who doesn’t want to be tickled SHOULD be unthinkable on basic Common Fucking Sense, and yet remains a common human-interaction dynamic that you often get happening with people you’d THINK would know better, and have them sulking and Upset. See also: most gender-based dynamics period.
It is disgustingly normalized and if you do anything but happily go along with such crap then you’re the bad guy. Imo that would be fine if only it would discourage from future repeats. Spoiler: it doesn’t.
As a day-to-day thing, I don’t do spontaneous, unless I am spontaneously keeping my butt at home on the couch with my cats rather than going out and doing whatever. I need advance notice, and planning time, and I do NOT like surprise! events. I have to deal with being “flexible” at work, and it saps all of the capacity I have for that out of me. Anyone doing any of the above to me would hear about it, at length, and with massive amounts of cursing.
( I have much more capacity for this when I’m visiting someplace safe, like my parents’ house, when I am already out of my schedule and work isn’t draining my coping energy. Sure, let’s go out and do something unplanned! But day to day? Nope.)
Yeah, this sounds fucking familiar
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