Your long-time pal just asked you to do something terrible for your health tonight — well, he didn’t ask so much as demand it. Your boy, who always puts your interests first, says you simply must trek to the other side of town to meet him at what sounds like either an illegal rave, a fight club, or a very aggressive farmer’s market. He’s not totally clear about it, but it sounds like there will be industrial music and people on hard drugs in a lot behind a railyard. You can only enter after midnight, after walking a quarter of a mile offroad through terrain best described as “crime-adjacent.”
You’re uneasy about it. Since the last time you two hung out, you’ve had daily IBS symptoms, your sleep is messed up, your seasonal cough is entering its fourth week, and your finger hasn’t grown back yet from playing chicken with airplane propellers.
On the other hand: Bro. C’mon.
You have to hand it to him — his skills of persuasion are exemplary, and he confidently assumes you have no self-preservation instincts. But still, he’s asking a lot of you, and for what? You can already feel the consequences lining up: the final heroic burst of cortisol to spark a nervous break, a tear on that ailing shoulder, a flareup worthy of the Real Housewives of Mount Etna.
He knows you have health conditions, both physical and psychiatric. After all these years, surely he knows what that means for you. Actually, there’s a chance he doesn’t — some abled people genuinely don’t grasp that disability means you really can’t operate on 90 minutes of sleep, or survive an intensive strobe light show.
You think of replying something responsible, like “can’t tonight, need rest,” but quickly toss that sad remark aside for what it is: something a person with boundaries would say.
Instead: “Aight. I’m down.”