Flakiness Rule

- Yepppp....
  I wish I was more reliable. I promise I really do love my friends 😥

One of the better moments of my life was when I confessed a bunch of stuff like this to a friend after flaking on him and he said "Yeah, I know you lied about why you couldn't make it, you're a really bad liar. I think probably all of your friends know who you are by now and they like you anyway."
He tossed it off like the most casual thing in the world, but the whole "you're not fooling anyone but some people still like you anyway" thought turned into a mantra for me that keeps the imposter syndrome and anxiety manageable.
- That's really wholesome 😊

65% of my flakes are due to the fact that I'm in the dumps and I know I can't "hold it in" so that I won't spoil it for the others. The other 35%, something completely drained my social battery either days or hours before - I feel like I'd rather do a week's worth of dishes than go through 3 minutes of introductory/catch-up small talk.
- Weirdly enough, I'm fine with the small talk. It's the afterwards that gets me - once the conversation is over I'm replaying it in my head and scrutinizing everything.
  
  Oh, I tend to multitask that alongside the small talk, and it's very difficult to play up the interest while nitpicking the hell out of the interaction.
  Plus, honestly, I'm far more interested in Real Shit™ nowadays. I don't even have a lot of small talk subjects, I either have niche, in-depth fixations, fetishistic levels of art apreciation (and I don't care if that sounds pretentious, it hurts to feel the need to dissect a complex song and have nobody with whom to do it), (amateur) philosophy and psychology, and - the Conversation Killer (apparently) - politics.
  I don't care what shade of blue the sky was today when you got here (***except if you're planning on incorporating it in a painting and you want to tell me about it, I'm all ears!), or who won the local football championship, tell me how life hurt you! Show me the scars, let me see your crazy, and I'll gladly show you mine! And then throw in some morbid yet funny jokes as a bonus!
- The anxiety keeps me from being flakey.
  what if this is the last straw and my friend group abandons me!?
  this would require me to be able to start a friendship to have one to maintain 🥲
  
  If the anxiety is keeping you from even forming a friendship in the first place, would you say that you're being flaky in advance?
  
  I used to feel that until I started meeting people who were just as interested in skipping the small talk, but far and very few between as of late...
  I don't have the energy to perform enforced social maintenance when the group doesn't understand that I'm not paralysed in bed as a caprice, I'm paralysed in bed because the weight of the world is on my mind again. And then I'm the bad guy when I'm genuinely incapable of even mimicking a smile and I'm "bringing everyone down." Yes. I know. I told you this outright, yet you insisted. Who is to blame, the radioactive metal, or the person who doesn't heed the Geiger screech?
  Plus, honestly, actual friends will still be there for you even if you disappear for years on end. I started moving back to my old city after a failed year-and-a-half experiment and people have already started reaching out - people with whom I haven't spoken in years, people with whom I used to drink the night away, sharing worries and traumas. I was deeply surprised by and grateful for this, all the more so because we went right back to chatting about serious life stuff.

I only have so many spoons
- Unfortunately I need spoons to calculate how much I can handle.
  The less spoons I have, the more likely i am to say "this will be fine"
  (Narrator: It was not fine.)