How do I tell my friends I don’t enjoy our hang outs
My friends and I often hang out in one person’s car. There are five seat seats and five of us. There’s an understanding that one of my friends who let’s call Lily always sits in the front and another one who lets call Mark always drives. Me and the other two who one is usually constant and one usually switches out with another person sit in the back. I have never been great with cars. I get carsick unless I am driving or sitting in the front. I also have sensory issues making it very uncomfortable to rub up against another person in the backseat. My sensory issues are not just. I don’t enjoy it. It’s my brain cannot focus on anything else other than the person directly next to me. I usually end up squishing myself into the door.
Lily always advocates for going for drives for fun. She is the one who enjoys this the most but she’s also the one who gets to sit in the front seat with tons of legroom and control the music always. I want to hang out with my friends, but 90% of the time the hangouts end up being driving to another town and I spend the rest of the night when I get home trying to decompress from that.
I’ve said before that I don’t enjoy being driving aimlessly as it’s upsetting to be squeezed up against other people when I said this, the person in the middle moved toward the other person in the backseat and well I appreciate that I don’t wanna be a burden who makes them more uncomfortable. I am closest with Lily and I’ve spoken to her vaguely about how this makes me uncomfortable, but still it ends up happening every hangout and I usually ask to be dropped off early.
Yesterday when we were planning a hang out, I said I would like to drive in my own car and meet them wherever they were going also had an errand to run which I did at the beginning of the night. I texted them asking where they were going. They said they don’t know and then they left me on read for the rest of the night they sent photos in the group chat of hanging out this morning and I spent the evening alone sitting in my car because no one would text me.
I wanna hang out, but I also don’t wanna sacrifice my own comfort and do things that directly disturb me. I also think I do have a pent up frustration with Lily always getting to sit in the front when she’s the one who advocates for these and doesn’t have to deal with the sweaty backseat, which by the way it doesn’t have any air vents. I’m not quite sure how to bring this up, but I know that I want to because I wanna continue hanging out with people. Can someone tell me how to address it?