#and more recently i've been learning n mastering the opening scenes to the play of 'making online friends'

[rubberbandballqueen]

had one of them "quarterly work meetings" just now and what i have learned is that i am severely lacking in the genre of social script that dictates how to behave when first joining a group of people you will be working with regularly from that point on

#i think mostly my coworkers are all people who are fairly neurotypical and so they like. Know how to do this stuff i guess #n so i'm kinda just standing there. like a vampire. needing to be invited in for lack of practice w/these scripts #n like i briefly mentioned this in the tags of a post on my other blog yesterday but like i notice smth similar in my chem lab #it's like i'm missing the first scene of a script to a play but have the rest of it memorized blocked n ready to go #as Soon as i know that my entrance isn't like a disruption of the expected flow i'm fine!!! i can do that shit!!!! #and more recently i've been learning n mastering the opening scenes to the play of 'making online friends' #which is different from real life bc online friendship is asynchronous. realizing now that's why online/irl friendships differ sometimes #n this is also why i tend to be more actively inviting at the start of smth new like a class or semester #bc those are the periods when the ~flow~ is setting itself n if i can manage to integrate into *that* i'm good i can do this #but i don't know how to *slip in* to an existing current as an active participant. i just know how to observe n absorb #bc it's ~personal sharing time~ (lol) but like obviously being Neurodivergent(tm) i misread a lot of cues growing up #n so now the goal feels like 'transition seamlessly into thing so that you're not a despised disruption' #which is why i've become so grateful to the kinds of people who make active efforts to include new people #like. thank you communications majors. i love you communications majors. i owe you my life communications majors. #bc it's so!! 'i promise i'm not snubbing you it's just that my direct instructions were to work Here so even though you are three feet away #'literally on the other side of this wall i'm not gonna come out n initiate conversation w/you bc those are Implicit Instructions' #'/Individual Expectations that i'm too afraid of reading incorrectly but if you come talk to me i will be normal abt it i promise' #the worm speaks #like pretty frequently these days i find myself thinking abt that one post that's like #'yeah back in the olden days being a good host was a learned skill n it involved these sorts of specific things' #'like matching up n introducing guests to each other by saying 'this is x this is y you both like turtles :)' #like i feel like that's the Spirit of icebreakers these days but even if you have interests in common w/someone across the circle #it can be kind of awkward to cross the room afterwards to talk to them so you just end up talking w/whoever's nearest or no one at all