Direct byproduct of being neurodivergent and growing up isolated from your peergroup is having no idea when it’s appropriate to define someone as your friend
Is this person I met yesterday my friend? What about this person I’ve been talking to every day for three months? What about this person I’ve known since middle school? Is friend a title I have to earn? What are the limits of friendship? Is it a static state, make-or-break, or is it some endless dance-dance-revolution style cavalcade of prompts and challenges and social cues I have to hit perfectly to keep it up? Does it bend? Does it break? I don’t fucking know man I just work here.
i still remember when the dude doing my autism assessment asked me how many friends I had, and I was like “okay but how are we defining friendship?” and he just like, stared at me for a second and then wrote down some notes
