People often talk about how friendships in adulthood are difficult and it’s true! Finding time within separate busy schedules to get together with others is like trying to piece together a complex puzzle and often times remembering to reach out just to talk is a task almost as difficult. Just as maintaining previously held friendships is a challenge, making new friends is as well. It’s no wonder, given how difficult it can be to keep the friends you already have, that finding new companions can be a nearly insurmountable task especially when you take into account the decreasing amount of third spaces (spaces outside of just work and home) in our society. Now, take the natural social difficulties that come with adulthood and multiply them tenfold. That’s how challenging having a social life can be for people like me, a socially traumatized autistic woman with a few mental health disorders to boot. For me, navigating friendships feels like walking through a minefield, and more often than not loneliness follows me like a dark cloud.

In writing this, my intention is to shed some light on a (I assume) common neurodivergent experience, exercise openness, and hopefully make other lonely losers like me feel a bit less alone in that. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I always struggled socially. At that point of my life, I didn’t know I was autistic which made things a lot harder on me. Left and right, I would have interactions with others where I was told I was “weird” or behaving “wrong” all because I didn’t pick up on the unwritten social rules that allistic kids had come to them naturally. If I had known I was autistic, then perhaps I wouldn’t have internalized these interactions nearly as much and instead given myself grace. After all, I was autistic and so naturally I wouldn’t approach social situations in a normative way. However, because I wasn’t aware of my inherent social differences I ended up just feeling like I was “off” or somehow wrong or bad for not getting things that others did. I faced a great deal of othering, rejection, and the like simply for being who I was. That kind of thing really leaves a mark on a person, and now I find myself socially terrified as I always think back to those times and fear I’ll repeat them. I carry these experiences with me despite it not being logical to apply these fears to each and every social interaction and relationship I have. Unfortunately, feelings don’t listen to logic and so no matter how hard I push myself to move past them in the name of what is rational that doesn’t always equate to success. 

Even without the unfortunate experiences I’ve had, autism on its own makes things difficult. For those who don’t know, a large part of autism is difficultly with social situations. It can make it difficult to read social cues, engage in non-verbal communication, and simply interact in a “typical” way. The fact of the matter is, autistic people often communicate in a far different way than those who are not even when they have explicitly learned the social skills considered normal. This can make friendships super hard, most often because autistic and allistic individuals will always have trouble getting on the exact same wavelength and there are bound to be communication mishaps between people of such vastly different neurotypes. Not to say that friendships with allistic people are impossible, far from it, just that they require an amount of effort greater than friendships with other autistic folk. See, my method of communication is quite direct and literal. Essentially, I never mean anything other than what I say and I often assume others are the same. Unfortunately, not so. Now, to more easily communicate and get along with allistic people and fit in, I could work hard to compensate for my differences and mask. This, however, is a highly draining thing to do I think in a way that most non-autistic individuals fail to realize. If I were to try to explain masking to someone I would likely tell them that it’s like constantly playing a character who isn’t much like yourself. You have to be intentional with everything you do, hypervigilant of those around you and yourself, and aware of the differences you have and how to account for them. It’s downright exhausting. Unfortunately, as an autistic person I often feel that I am expected to conform to societal expectations when it comes to social situations and that allistic people aren’t nearly so expected to be aware of autistic social differences nor try to fit in with us. Essentially, there’s not a lot of social meeting in the middle happening. It can be rather disheartening, in truth, to be autistic while trying to make friends.

There are many other facets of my identity and past experiences that I believe contribute to my specific loneliness and struggle with friendships, the troubles with consistency that come along with Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder chief among them, but I certainly don’t believe they make it entirely. I am aware, first, that most or many people around my age start to discover the difficulties of adult friendships right around this time. I mean, when we’re not in buildings stuck together with large groups of similar aged individuals it isn’t exactly a surprise that we make lots of friends. Only now when we’ve reached the an age that really sees us out living our adult lives do we really see how difficult friendships can be to gain and maintain. So, naturally, I struggle with all the common problems young adults face in their social lives. Additionally, I can acknowledge my own mistakes. Frankly, through years of difficult social experiences, major losses, mental health struggles, and challenging academic programs, I have often been someone that doesn’t always engage in friendships consistently or with a high degree of effort. I have, admittedly, not reached out to friends enough, spoken to them often, or made a huge effort to be around them. I have gone through periods of more effort, but still. Now, I find myself with renewed purpose and ready to make and keep friends because after all, a thriving social life has always been a great desire of mine (in fact, I often believe it may be a big part of the secret to me living a satisfying life). The catch is, I find myself at the base of a steep mountain gearing up for the ascent of a lifetime. To make the friends I want and foster the friendships I already have it will no doubt be a colossal effort or at least it feels that way. I take solace, at least, in the fact that maybe I’m not alone in that. At the end of the day, I know I’ll find my people and the knowledge that it’s possible keeps me slogging through the loneliness of my here and now.