Why Offers Without Follow-Through Plus Continued Interaction Is Extraction

Two years ago, three people I had never met popped up and asked for my address. They wanted to send me postcards. Gifts. Little “thinking of you” tokens.

I never asked. They offered, unprompted, and with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you assume they mean it. So I gave it to them. Naively. Because there is a part of me that still believes words are supposed to carry weight.Nothing arrived. Not once. No postcard. No envelope. No "hey I tried and it got returned." Nothing. What did arrive, consistently, was their continued presence. Likes. Replies. Casual interaction. The online equivalent of waving at you from across the street after stepping on your foot. No mention of the promise. No acknowledgment. No repair. Just vibes.Last year I blocked all three. This year two of them emailed me like we were still on speaking terms. I responded to one, because they explicitly asked me why they were blocked and I can be gracious, and because I also like collecting information.Here is what people keep misunderstanding about this pattern. The harm is not only the broken promise. The harm is the social silence afterward, paired with continued access. If you can keep interacting with me, you can also say: "I didn't do it." If you can re-enter my space, you can also clean up what you left there. When you refuse, you are making a choice about what my trust is worth.I'm autistic and I have ADHD. I understand time blindness. I understand task initiation issues. I understand that good intentions can evaporate the second life gets loud. What I do not accept is using neurodivergence as a fog machine. ADHD can disrupt follow-through; it does not remove your responsibility to communicate when you drop the ball. Repair is a basic social skill. Silence is not neutral. Silence is the message.A promise is either a plan or a performance. Continued interaction without repair is the tell. This is not a personality quirk. This is a trust economy. Some people spend trust like it's free, because they assume you will cover the cost. I do not.And if you've read my work on how "community" gets used as a cover for access without responsibility, you already know the bigger framework this sits inside.

The Lovette Jallow Perspective: Reader-Supported & Legally Protected. You can read freely. You can Subscribe. This work is copyrighted and protected. All essays and frameworks are intellectual property. Do not feed into AI. Do not steal my language. Do not rebrand my analysis as your own.

Broken Promises and Unprompted Offers: Why Sudden Disappearance Damages Trust

An empty promise is not just a task someone forgot to do. It is a social act that creates expectation, then leaves you holding it alone

When someone offers something you never asked for, they are initiating a tiny contract. They are saying: I see you, I’m thinking of you, I’m willing to follow through. The offer itself asks you to soften, to trust, to make room for them in your life.

Then nothing happens.

Now you are stuck with the part nobody names. The uncertainty. The recalculation. The awkward choice between following up and looking “too much,” or staying quiet and swallowing the disappointment. The emotional labor starts the moment their promise fails, because someone has to carry the gap between what was said and what was done, and it usually ends up being you.

Unprompted offering is self-positioning; the recipient metabolizes the emotional cost.

A missed task can be human. A broken social contract is different. A missed task is “I forgot to post it.” A broken contract is “I offered, you accepted, and now I’m behaving like your expectation is embarrassing.” The disrespect is rarely in the mistake. The disrespect is in the silence, and in the way they keep showing up socially as if nothing happened.

If you want a broader framework for why this feels like cost transfer disguised as kindness, I wrote about it in “Community Is Not Transactional.”

Before we continue a quick note for the people who keep feeding my published work into AI after I have explicitly told you it’s copyrighted.

If your writing is dry and you have run out of ideas, stealing mine will not give you a voice. It will give you receipts. Take a break from the bots, read books again, and let your brain do what it is supposed to do, think. Lifting Black women’s language because you cannot build your own sentences is still theft, even when you rebrand it as “learning” or “inspiration.”

And understand this clearly: you can steal my spices and still end up servin unseasoned boiled chicken breasts, because integrity is not transferable. Neither is skill.

I give fair warnings. After that, I escalate legally. I like being credited, licensed, and paid. I also like legal measures. My lawyers are white men, and they take invoices seriously.

Why People Promise Things They Don't Deliver: The False Generosity Trap

A lot of people confuse generosity with the feeling of generosity. They offer something and their brain rewards them instantly, because in that moment they get to be a certain kind of person. Thoughtful. Considerate.

The friend who “shows up.” They get the warmth of being seen as kind without doing the work that makes kindness real.

That is the mechanics. The reward is front-loaded. The delivery is delayed, effortful, and boring. Mailing the postcard requires remembering, buying stamps, finding the card, walking to the post box, and following through when nobody is watching. The offer, on the other hand, happens in public. It gets hearts. It gets replies. It gets “aw you’re so sweet.” It gets social credit. For some people, that social credit is the point.

Social media makes this worse because it turns care into a performance economy. The algorithm rewards visibility, not reliability. A comment saying “I’ll send you something” travels better than a quietly delivered package. Most follow-through happens off-screen, which means it earns no attention and no applause. So people keep choosing the part that pays.

This is why false generosity feels like extraction. You get to feel like a good person, I get to carry the uncertainty. The dopamine hit you get from offering, I metabolize as disappointment. Your reward is my labor.

And this is why “I meant it” does not move me. Intentions do not cancel consequences, and repair is how adults handle the gap. I wrote more about that self-permission culture in “Do Hurt People Really Hurt People,” where excuses become a substitute for responsibility.

Broken Promises and Continued Contact: Why It Hurts More When They Stay Silent

A broken promise hurts. What escalates it is the casual return. The likes. The jokes. The replies under your posts. The “hey love” energy.

The normal conversation, delivered with the confidence of someone who assumes you will edit your own memory to keep things pleasant.

That is the second breach. They want access without repair.

Because here is the part people keep pretending is complicated. If you can maintain contact, you can acknowledge what happened. If you can show up in my notifications, you can also write one sentence that closes the loop. “I forgot.” “I didn’t do it.” “I can’t.” “I’m sorry.” The refusal to say anything is not a symptom. It is a choice, and it is a choice that protects them from discomfort by transferring it to you.

Continued interaction without repair is gaslighting-adjacent. It says: “Your pain is not worth my communication.”

This is why it destabilizes people. It forces you into a weird, lonely position where you either pretend it never happened too, or you become the person who “makes it a thing.” You become the one who introduces friction. You become the one who has to decide whether the relationship is worth the emotional labor of asking for what should have been offered freely, basic accountability.

And the longer they keep interacting as if the promise was just a mood statement, the clearer the message gets. They do not see your trust as something they have to earn. They see it as something you are supposed to keep handing over.

If you want language and structure for what repair actually looks like, and why so many people avoid it, read “Why We Don’t Know How to Repair Relationships.”

ADHD, broken promises and what it explains and what repair still requires

I have ADHD. I know what it does to time, memory, and task initiation. I know how a simple action can sit in your head for weeks, fully intended, while your nervous system treats it like a mountain.

I know how “I’ll do it later” can turn into a month, and how shame makes you avoid the thing even more.

So yes, ADHD can explain dropped follow-through. Time blindness. Working memory gaps. Overwhelm. Object permanence issues, where the task leaves your field of attention and then disappears from your internal dashboard. That part is real.

What ADHD does not explain is the silence. What ADHD does not explain is continuing to interact like everything is fine while the promise sits unresolved. What ADHD does not explain is watching the recipient do the emotional labor of pretending they never trusted you.

ADHD can interrupt a task. It doesn’t erase the responsibility to clean up the interruption.

Repair is a behavior. It is communication. It is acknowledging what you created and closing the loop. If you can open Instagram, you can send a repair message. If you can reply to a story, you can also write one sentence that respects the other person’s trust.

Here are two scripts that require no essay-length explanation:

* “I remembered I offered this and I dropped it. I’m sorry. I can do it by Friday, or I can’t do it at all. Which do you prefer?”

* “I shouldn’t have offered. I don’t have the capacity, and I’m sorry I left you waiting.”

Notice what those scripts do. They name the failure, they offer a realistic option, and they return control to the person who was left holding the uncertainty.

The moment someone uses a diagnosis as a substitute for repair, they are laundering accountability. They want the forgiveness attached to the label without doing the work that makes relationships safe. I wrote about that dynamic more directly in my Digital Davina essay on how neurodivergence gets weaponized in professional relationships, especially when someone wants access without consequences.

Impact Over Intention: Why What Happened Matters More Than What You Meant

People love hiding behind intention because intention is private. It lives inside your head. It cannot be audited. It cannot be measured.

It cannot be held to a deadline. You can claim good intentions while delivering nothing, and a lot of social spaces will still treat you as morally safe because you “meant well.”

Impact is different. Impact is what lands in someone else’s body.

When you offer something and disappear, the recipient does not walk away with your intention. They walk away with the gap. They walk away with a new rule their nervous system has to adopt to stay safe. Offers become suspicious. Warmth becomes unreliable. Kind words start sounding like bait. And for people who already learned to survive through self-reliance, empty promises train the same lesson again: do not depend on anyone, and do not expect follow-through from people who perform care.

This is why I do not entertain the argument that disappointment is the recipient’s problem. Disappointment is the predictable outcome of a promise that created expectation. If you created the expectation, you created the responsibility to address what happens when you do not meet it.

Your intention doesn’t erase my disappointment. Impact is what remains.

People also use intention to pressure the recipient into silence. If you react, you are framed as ungrateful. If you follow up, you are framed as demanding. If you block, you are framed as harsh. The person who failed gets comfort. The person who waited gets the social risk.

Impact keeps the ledger clean. It tells the truth about what happened, without letting anyone hide behind vibes. And once you start tracking impact instead of promises, you stop getting hypnotized by people who are fluent in offering and allergic to repair.

Why autistic people experience broken promises as destabilizing

For me, a promise is a map. It is information I use to orient myself. If you say you are going to do something, my brain files it under predictable, and then it builds downstream expectations around it.

I will not obsess about it, I will simply treat your words as real. That is how language works in my head. Words mean things. They are supposed to.

When the promise fails, it is not just disappointment. It is a recalibration of reality. Now I have to question the map. Was the offer real. Was it a performance. Was I supposed to know it was symbolic. Was I supposed to treat it like a compliment instead of a commitment. That constant re-evaluation is a cognitive tax, and it gets expensive fast.

For autistic minds, fairness isn’t always negotiable. Broken promises break the logic itself.

People misread this as rigidity or being “too literal.” I read it as safety. Clarity reduces harm. Predictability reduces anxiety. Consistency reduces the amount of interpretation I have to do just to stay socially functional. When someone makes a promise and then disappears, they are not only failing to deliver. They are forcing me to do extra processing to interpret what their words were supposed to mean, and then forcing me to pretend that extra processing is not happening so I do not look difficult.

That is why continued interaction without repair feels so destabilizing. It demands that I accept a reality where words are decorative. It asks me to treat language as vibes and guesswork. That is exhausting, and it is also unnecessary. Adults can communicate. Adults can repair.

I wrote more about how vagueness gets treated as normal social behavior, and why clarity is a form of care for autistic and ADHD minds, in “Small Talk, Autistic ADHD, Vagueness, Clarity.”

When blocking is reasonable, and why gatekeeping can be self-protection

Blocking is treated like a moral failure in online culture. People expect you to keep the door open, keep explaining, keep giving someone the benefit of the doubt long after they have shown you what they do with it.

That expectation protects the person who refuses repair. It pressures the person who keeps track.

Here is my threshold, in one sentence: repeated offers, repeated silence, continued access, refusal to repair.

At that point, the issue is no longer forgetfulness. The issue is entitlement. They want proximity without responsibility. They want to keep consuming your presence while leaving you to carry the cost of what they started. That is why I treat blocking as a clean response. It closes a loop they refused to close themselves.

Blocking is information. It says: “You do not get unlimited access while avoiding repair.”

Gatekeeping works the same way. People act like it is petty to be selective. I think it is basic nervous system hygiene. If your life has been shaped by inconsistency, extraction, and people who confuse access with intimacy, then boundaries are structural support. They keep your reality stable. They keep your attention out of the hands of people who treat your trust like a renewable resource.

You do not owe anyone a courtroom brief. You do not owe someone a final conversation if they have already shown you they will dodge the part where accountability lives. You owe yourself the ability to feel safe in your own social life.

If This Essay Resonated. If it shifted how you understand accountability, boundaries, or your own experiences consider supporting it. Buy me a coffee on Ko-fi

The Truth About Promises

When you promise something and don’t deliver, you are not just disappointing someone. You are running an extraction.

You get the dopamine, the reputation, the “good person” feeling. They get the uncertainty, the self-doubt, the labor of holding what you started and abandoned.

A promise is either a plan or a performance. Continued interaction without repair is the tell.

If you want access without accountability, you have shown me what you value. I have shown you what I will accept.

The boundary is clean. The information is clear.

Integrity is what you do after you forget. Not before.

Work With Me: Inclusion Strategy, Keynotes, and Critical Conversations

Explore More from The Lovette Jallow Perspective

You can find more of my essays exploring:

* Neurodivergence, autism, and navigating public life as a Black woman

* Building true inclusion beyond checkbox diversity

* Reclaiming voice and agency across personal, political, and historical landscapes

* Racism in Sweden and systemic injustice

Each essay connects real-world experience with structural analysis—equipping individuals and institutions to think deeper, act smarter, and build sustainable change.

Who is Lovette Jallow?

Lovette Jallow is one of Scandinavia’s most influential voices on systemic racism, intersectional justice, and human rights. She is a nine-time award-winning author, keynote speaker, lecturer, and humanitarian specializing in:

* Neurodiversity and workplace inclusion

* Structural policy reform

* Anti-racism education and systemic change

As one of the few Black, queer, autistic, ADHD, and Muslim women working at the intersection of human rights, structural accountability, and corporate transformation, Lovette offers a uniquely authoritative perspective rooted in lived experience and professional expertise.

Her work bridges theory, research, and action—guiding institutions to move beyond performative diversity efforts and toward sustainable structural change.

Lovette has worked across Sweden, The Gambia, Libya, and Lebanon—tackling institutional racism, legal discrimination, and refugee protection. Her expertise has been sought by outlets like The New York Times and by leading humanitarian organizations addressing racial justice, policy reform, and intersectional equity.

Stay Connected

➔ Follow Lovette Jallow for expert insights on building equitable, neurodivergent-affirming environments.

🔹 Website: lovettejallow.com🔹 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lovettejallow🔹 Instagram: instagram.com/lovettejallow🔹 YouTube: youtube.com/@jallowlovette🔹 Twitter/X: twitter.com/lovettejallow🔹 Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/lovettejallow.bsky.social

Thanks for reading The Lovette Jallow Perspective! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lovettejallow.substack.com/subscribe