Stop squeezing?

My favourite question to contemplate as I move forward is "Is the juice worth the squeeze?"

And as we were stranded up a mountain after our EV experience put us off them for life, my conclusion was...

... We should just stop squeezing.

Backstory: We'd been invited to spend the weekend with a lovely family who, honestly, we don't actually know very well, and this would be the chance to get to know each other better. Except we're not that kind of easy going couple who can share space with people and just hit the ground running the next day. (See space sharing post)

So our initial reaction was ....arrrghhhhh, this is not a scenario that accommodates our little spicy foibles, but what can we do? It's not easy to make friends as neurospicers, and while online friends abound, we are wired to have friends in person too, and being expats where friend groups inevitably leave, it was an opportunity. It was a topic of debate for a good few days, how to respect our own needs and manage expectations without burning bridges.

The solution came together quite easily in the end, and we were set to go up just for the day, so hiring a car, driving 2 hours there, and then back again, with a chunk in the middle to be sociable. Perhaps a chunk that's twice the limit of my social battery, esp in a language that's not even my second, but with time planned in to recover the next day (as per Dr Megan Anna Neff's Autistic Burnout Workbook) But even that was pushing our limits, especially as Big C had flown in on Friday and was flying out on Monday, and dog and son were home alone to avoid further complications.

So stuck up the mountain, having barely made it through a tunnel with the battery down to single figures (do you remember the catalyst scene from What Dreams May Come, 1998 with Robin Williams?😥) we were ranting. "See, this is what happens when we don't follow our instincts!! We knew this wasn't going to work for us!! Now we've wasted all this time and money and and and...this is because we're trying to force things that we know in our bodies are not for us!!! We've just got to stop squeezing!!"

Cut to the journey home, where we'd been rescued by a tow truck, had a brief but lovely time with the families and were on our way back. Our conclusion was no longer to stop squeezing. We were marvelling at just how well the social part, the part that was looming, had gone - that the whole bonkers situation actually served to support us. The time was just right, our adventure gave us a natural and uncontroversial topic for conversation, and what we had gone through to get there was definitely appreciated, even if not for all the reasons. Ice had been broken.

And the lesson we took from the day?

Never hire an electric car again!

While the 90' with our hosts was ideal, the 9.5 hours driving, charging and waiting with the uncertainty of whether we'd make it to the next charging spot was not worth the squeeze.