BlackHeart Biohazards

noxious-wren:

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“This got very long and i understand if you delete without reading.”

This sounds very unlike me.

Re the situation, it sounds to me like these friends are either not very good friends in the first place or have backslid into “everyone exists to comfort me” due to pandemic stress or the like.

My dad calls things like writing “chunk work” where you need to work up to getting in the flow and you need uninterrupted focus. The opposite are all those petty little tasks that eat your whole day, like answering trivial business e-mails or doing the dishes.

Whether you have an attention disorder or executive function problems or no, most brains fundamentally have different modes and aren’t good at doing things like creative writing without some uninterrupted time. This has very little to do with how much time you do or don’t spend with friends and a lot to do with more consciously managing your day and your brain.

If these friends refuse to understand this or conflate it with taking a month off from friendship, that’s a them problem, and you need new friends.

It’s perfectly normal and fine to send a meme or a random discord PM to a friend and for them to respond hours later because they were busy.

It seems like there are actually 3 things going on here:

1. Your “friends” are pretending they don’t understand how high-focus tasks work.
2. Your “friends” demand you be available at the drop of a hat in a way that is unrealistic and that ruins most people’s schedules.
3. Your “friends” would consider it a massive imposition to be on-call for you in the same way but learn zero lessons about it being unreasonable in the other direction.

Possibly a fourth is that they have no intention of changing how they interact with social media, and they know that if you do, it signals the end of your routine interactions. And this might be true. I’ve lost friends, at least for a few years, when our internet use diverged.

But there’s no way around it: if you don’t want doomscrolling eating your time, you need to extract yourself from friend circles that interact heavily in real time on twitter. You need friends who write e-mails and wait for the response or who send a PM and are happy to come back to the conversation once you’ve answered.