#while we're here this is a safe space for ALL neurodivergent people & ppl with trauma including people with PDs just btw

[gripes-withthesun]

some people reblogging that addition with the story about my friends and I gushing over each other behind each other's backs are saying "or you could just say that to their faces" or "this is why you need to tell them instead of keeping it in your mind" but the thing is!! I got to know about it in the first place BECAUSE I was told.

When I exited the staff room after our discussion on the paper presentations I found them talking and they said "we were just talking about how cool you are" and i was like "no way! We were talking last night about how cool you are!" That incident was reassuring because it helped us open up to each other as a friend group too. When I hear a song that reminds me of my friend I text her now and say 'I think I like this song only because I imagine it in your voice'. When I'm at some fun event I text my friend saying 'wish you were here with me'. But the knowledge that our friends don't "secretly hate us" had to come from that incident for me.

Because at the very centre of it is this insecurity that they might lie when they're saying it to our face, they might be saying it to be nice, they might be pretending to like us for whatever reason, they might have liked us once but don't anymore and don't know how to say it, etc etc. And I think it's far more reassuring for a lot of us to know that even when we aren't there, even when there is no impetus to be lying, even then our friends will express their love towards us. Not just to us, but to anyone who will listen. It's a beautiful thing!

And likewise there are so many people tagging the story with how they have a hard time expressing their affection too, or they don't feel ready to gush about someone to their face, and that's not a flaw, that's also coming from the same insecure place of coming off as caring too much, as being too invested, as being too close, as being too "desperate", all of which has been used against a lot of people. Or it's simply a difference in communication styles and love languages. And that's why just knowing that your friends' love for you is still constant and expressed without your presence is reassuring and opens up more avenues to communicate all this in the first place.

Lot of people, especially fellow autistic people👋🏻, who are saying that's not been their experience? That's absolutely valid. Because it hadn't been mine either until I was in college, and it really is hard for neurodivergent and particularly autistic folk when every friendship is a guessing game of when their patience with your lack of social understanding runs out and they start "dropping hints" that they don't wanna be friends anymore but you never pick up those hints. Those insecurities don't just come out of nowhere and that's why it takes us long to feel secure enough in a friendship to both 1) know that our friends love us for realsies and 2) be able to express the sheer magnitude of our own affection without fear of it being another thing for them to mock. It takes time to feel secure in our connections again! And that's okay we're all just trying to find our place and recovering, and that's why incidents like those mean so much to people like us.

Sorry about this getting so long, but tldr: "just tell them they're cool to their face instead!" hasn't worked for many of us because of valid experiences of ostracization. It's a great practice to have to tell your friends you love them! But for anyone who isn't feeling secure enough to do so, it's okay to express affection in other ways. Gush about your friends to other friends! Maybe even with that friend present. Because that first time my friends said "we were just talking about how cool you are" it was said in this casual manner but that opened up the gates for much more ardent and sincere expressions of love