Plan a social event like you'd plan a work talk
Treat a social event as a planned event you take seriously: research who'll be there, prep a few light topics, sleep and eat beforehand. Offloading the work to BEFORE the event removes the in-the-moment cognitive load a neurodivergent brain can't reliably improvise.
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A neurodivergent brain doesn’t reliably improvise in real time, so ‘expecting it to go well without preparing’ is a common failure mode. The fix is to plan a social event with the same seriousness as any other event you’d prepare for, such as a work presentation: find out who will be there, sleep well the night before, and eat or snack ahead of time so basic regulation is already in place.
A specific, high-leverage piece of prep is a short list of ‘safe’ conversation topics — things genuinely interesting to you but light enough for the setting. Pre-loading a few topics removes the live demand of generating speech on the spot, and choosing ones you actually like keeps you from either being bored or defaulting to overly heavy go-to subjects. The point isn’t to script the evening; it’s to move as much load as possible off real-time processing, where it costs the most.
