Buddy story · Neurodivergence
Routines, and what happens when the routine is the point
Both autistic, both wrecked by the change in interoception, and both relieved to find somebody who did not think that was a strange thing to be wrecked by.
- Paired
- August 2025
- Cadence
- Tuesdays and Fridays
- Status
- ongoing
The specific difficulty, which neither had seen described anywhere, was that a body that had always signalled hunger in one particular way stopped doing it, and that the loss of a reliable internal signal was far more destabilising than the appetite change itself.
What they built for each other was scaffolding rather than reassurance: fixed times, fixed formats, a shared understanding that a missed message is not a rupture, and an agreement that either may say "not today" without explanation and it will never be raised again.
Both are in neurodivergent-and-glp1. Fen says the circle and the buddy do different jobs and she would not give up either.
It was not that I was less hungry. It was that the signal I had used my whole life stopped arriving, and nobody I spoke to understood the difference.
Either of us can say "not today" and it is never mentioned again. That rule is why this has lasted.