I think I'm a bad friend. I'm definitely bad at making friends, so it doesn't seem like much of a stretch. Perhaps this should be taken with a grain of salt because I drafted this at 4 am at the height of covid isolation induced madness. Or perhaps that's my truest self. Who's to say?
I find friendships and relationships confusing and awkward and I don't really know how to navigate them. I constantly feel at a loss for what to say, or when to say, or how to approach people. Conversations are often confusing and bewildering to me, full of information I don't want and cues I don't understand and an unknown and mysterious optimal level of talking I should be doing but always miss.
A large part of it is my inability to manage at the conversational level. I'm bad at meeting new people. I don't know how to talk to new people because I don't really know how to talk to anyone. I'm an anxious person. I worry a lot about how I'm perceived. Am I annoying? Am I fun? How can I possibly know? I'm convinced that I, myself, am unlikeable and that everyone must find me annoying. So I got out to parties, get drunk, meet people, talk excitedly about whatever, go home, and find myself unable to text them ever. What if they hate me? How can I ever know if they hate me? I think they must hate me.
I find groups frustrating to near impossible. I have sensory issues. It's hard enough for me to have a conversation with background noise. If there's more than one conversation? I'm doomed. If the social event plays music? I'm doomed. I don't understand why everyone seems to think you need music to socialize. Doesn't it detract from the expirience? Everyone always claims to meet people at clubs, but I can't hear a single word anyone says while I'm there. The autistic confusion of existing in a neurotypical world.
I frequently find myself in parties that claim to be neurodivergent friendly, but often that means that there's a designated "quiet room" with activities like "colouring". And while that may help some people, I find it useless and patronizing, like something my mom would do because she's been reading a blog by a well meaning neurotypical parent and has convinced herself that she could fix me if I would only try a little harder. It doesn't solve the problems I actually want solved: a way to talk to people one on one, a removal from the anxieties of talking to people, clearer flags of intentions and emotions, protection from background noise. It often comes with well meaning people sitting down and talking to me like I'm having baby's first overwhelmed meltdown (far from it, pal). It doesn't solve the stigma of having to leave early, of being awkward, of coasting off a more successful person's social connections, of being told that I "seem cold" or "distant" or "too cool" because I need to spend most of the party not talking to anyone in order to focus on anything.
Perhaps there is a flaw in my party strategy. My party system is pretty simple. Get invited by well meaning social friend, obsess over an outfit (but I cannot elaborate on that struggle without talking about my gender), go to the party, find myself unable to talk to approach anyone, lean against a wall, and wait for someone to approach me. Often they do and I don't really know what to say apart from blankly agreeing with everything they say, so I must come off as vapid and annoying. I cannot talk about myself. Such would be rude and boring. And so eventually people drift off or I make excuses and leave because the conversation is boring me and the cycle repeats.
There are exceptions. Some of the most fascinating discussions I've ever had are with people with the same strategy. I know how to identify them because I see myself in them. And we always have a really lovely chat in a quiet space under the table for half an hour and then the party shifts and they're gone. We didn't even exchange numbers.
Sometimes, I get drunk and get opinionated, and I've been told that I'm fun to be around when I'm drunk, but it doesn't change that I don't like who I am when I'm drunk. I'm loud and opinionated and boisterous and maybe rude. I dominate conversations and push on boundaries. I always wake up the next day feeling terribly guilty about it. And even if I do make friends while drunk, my mouth makes checks my sober self cannot cash. I fall back on my inability to text people (because they might not want to hear from me) the very next day. Perhaps I could fix this by drinking 24/7, but that seems like a terrible plan for many many reasons.
And that's the other big problem. I don't really maintain friendships actively or plan things very well. The easiest friendships for me to maintain have always been the ones where there was an outside activity we were forced into. Like, for example, a school we went to daily. Without that external structure, I just rot.
I'm not interactive by nature. I am content to sit in my room for weeks on end, even if it makes me sad, and, barring intervention from other people, I will do that. I don't know how to arrange events. In fact, I hate doing it. I find the expectations of organizing something to be an impossible task: how can I possibly balance the desires and preferences of everyone who comes? If I organize something, I become personally responsible for the joy of every person there. And that's not tenable. I'm autistic and I cannot read people, so I become annoying about asking how everyone is doing.
And maybe people just aren't telling me what they want. How should I know? I can't possibly just pick the options that satisfy me, that would be an abuse of power. I don't enjoy nights out. I dislike loud parties. I find bars difficult to navigate because my high alcohol tolerance makes them an expensive and sober evening. I do not understand the appeal of raves or clubs at all. My optimal evening involves staying home and playing a board game or watching a movie.
I'm sure many people do enjoy evenings at home just as much as I do. But I always feel like they don't and that makes it hard for me to function during them. This likely ties into deeper issues I have, like for example my persistent belief that everyone is just being polite when discussing my work and secretly hate it. That's beyond the scope of this post.
And of course there are other issues. The number of events I don't go to over anxiety (I have faked so many colds) plus the number of times I drop out early leaves people thinking I don't like events. And then I stop getting invited. And that always hurts a little, the revelation that people are going to things I did not know about, even though it could be argued I brought it on myself.
But I don't think it's just me because there's always a funny dance of social expectations. I've watched people plan board game nights in front of me, ostensibly their friend, and been sneered at when I asked if I could come. I also once almost missed a party that was planned in front of me because I never asked if I could come and no one had thought it was necessary to explicitly tell me "hey, you're invited". But then I do bring it on myself sometimes, because the next time they planned a party, they explicitly sent me an invite graphic. My first thought was that they were just showing off the artwork on their cool graphic, not that I was actually invited.
I have close friendships and I enjoy them. But I have to continually fight to maintain them and I can only ever manage a couple. Friendgroups seem to be out of my reach. There's too much to keep up with, too much to follow. They continually seem to pop up around me and perhaps while others might consider me inside them, I have a hard time considering myself as such. I always feel like I'm left out of some key group chat, left out of some key event, confused and alone. Perhaps there is an essential skill everyone else acquired that I lack? I feel like maybe a part of me is broken, even though I can live a complete and whole life without it.
Sometimes I think about all the social opportunities I've had that I missed out on out of anxiety. Partially in all the times I've ducked out a gathering last minute over an anxiety attack, but especially in terms of missed connections. People I chatted to at parties or events or otherwise and greatly enjoyed, and then never spoke to again. An elephant graveyard of contacts I was too afraid to ever text. There are too many to count. And the flipside, people who have made the effort to talk to me only to run afoul of my fabulously low social battery and receive a continual sea of "I'm sorry, I'm too busy or tired or dead inside" and eventually gave up, they exist in great numbers too. I feel guilty about them. I forget to keep up with close friends unless prodded, in part because I think my constant attempts to make conversation might be boring. I feel guilty about that too.
I struggle to push through the necessary deception required for conversation. Someone, upon me confiding that I had no idea how to talk to strangers, confidently declared that I should be asking for their signs. When I expressed that I think astrology is all fake, they said that they agreed, but I should just pretend otherwise because it's a good conversation starter. And I can't do that? Is that how everyone else makes conversation? I'm just not very good at lying. And all the advice I get on conversation seems to be that I should get better at lying.
And because of that, I struggle to talk about myself. I always worry about dominating conversations, talking too fast for too long about some niche thing that no one cares about like the comic history of the Guardians of the Galaxy, the history of DnD, the Ubers meta on Pokemon Showdown, how to make video games, any of my backlog of projects, or why RSS is really cool and smart. Sometimes a well meaning friend introduces me as "A person who makes video games" and it always introduces a gut feeling of panic. Can I back that up? Is that promising more than I can deliver? Are my skills worthy of that title? Does anyone even care? It makes it hard to talk about myself which makes meeting new people at all hard.
I try to post memes daily into Discord servers. It's my way of saying that I am here. That I matter. That I'm thinking of you and I hope you're thinking of me. I've been doing it less lately. A couple changes in my social media habits have dramatically decreased the flow rate of memes into my meme folder and I've already used up the backlog on most of my servers. I don't know what to do about that.
I feel like an outsider. I moved cities in December and I haven't figured out how to navigate that yet. I feel like I left all my friends behind, although that wasn't very many. I feel that my attempts to make new friends are mixed to poor.
I don't really have any answers. I don't want to be difficult and bend the world in my favour. I just want to be seen. I want to be invited no matter how often I refuse. I want to feel heard and respected and safe. I want people to know that I like them even if I struggle to show it. I want communications to be explicit and clearer. I want people to know I'm not cool and detached, I'm alone and terrified. I want to get better in whatever shape that takes, as long as it takes. I will keep doing my best, whatever form that takes. Please be patient with me. Stay awesome, dear readers.
Today's link of the day is abramawitz! It's the personal site of a good friend of mine who was always very patient with my social anxieties and is also the most skilled writer I have ever met and takes incredible photos. You owe it to yourself to give their blog a read.