Hi friends,

This is a long collection of thoughts about a topic that, it turns out, I have a lot of feelings about. I feel like I haven’t even touched the sides of this topic, yet it’s probably a bit self-indulgent. Soz if it’s too long, I’ll try and rein it in next week with something a bit more positive!

It’s 2007. I’m a teenager hanging around the town centre with a few people I know from school. We’re the weird ones, the group that other school kids wouldn’t be seen dead with. This is the main thing that binds us together, along with a similar zany sense of humour.

These are my people, but still something seems off. As we’re walking around the shopping centre, I’m always trailing slightly behind or to the side of everyone else. I try and keep up with the group conversation, but I struggle to find a space to join in. When I do eventually speak, someone tends to speak over me, or repeats what I said a few minutes later at a slightly louder volume. I know I’m not integral to the gang, more a nice added extra. I’m so old-headed and overly sensible that the group tends to refer to me, ‘jokingly’ as the ‘granny of the group’.

How can you have friends and still feel rejected?

I am an AuDHD teenager, but I’m oblivious to my own neurodivergence. Every night I scold myself about how I acted during the day. I say and do stuff that appears downright weird to others. Kids at school say I am ‘mysterious’, ‘a bit scary’ and ‘a snob’. I know I appear aloof but I don’t know why that is. I struggle to connect with others. I can talk to adults a lot easier than I can talk to people my own age. Nobody likes the same things as me, to the same degree of intensity. The anxiety of social situations makes things even worse. I noticeably shake when speaking to people.

When I tell my family of my own concerns about how I act around people, they tell me not to worry, and that everyone does that. (Funnily enough, in over a decade’s time I’ll discover that, along with our blue eyes and boney faces, autism and ADHD are family traits.)

I’m a walking paradox; a natural loner who yearns for friendship.

Solitude, as I’ve argued before, is beautiful and necessary for so many of us to maintain a decent sense of mental wellbeing. With the exception of spending time with my partner, there is nothing better than the experience of hyperfocussing on an interesting topic. For me, there are few things as sublime as sitting down to read a Wikipedia article at 3pm to look up and find it’s 10pm, with 100 tabs open, a mouth dry as sand, desperate for a wee and a head full of facts about a new favourite subject.

However, too much of a good thing can have its downsides. As a teenager, I’d often be called a ‘hermit’ because I loved spending time on my own in my room, whether I was writing or making music. But I was also isolated and keenly felt the rejection of other kids. Why would I go out again to the bear pit when I knew what was going to happen?

Society forgets that autism does not equate to introversion. Many autistic people are introverts and many are extroverts. I’m a classic introvert. Spending time with people drains my energy, no matter who it is. I tip my hat to the autistic extroverts, seeking energy from the company of others whilst trying to navigate the complexities of social interaction. I can’t imagine how much of a tightrope walk that is. Yet although I am an introvert, I know that if I spend too long by myself, my mood dips dramatically. I crave connection and community.

The social side of school was always a challenge for me. Academia was easy because there were rules and a structure: do well in your exams and advance to the next rung of the academic ladder.

Socialising is not like that. There is no road map. Humans do not come with a manual on how to operate. There is no script.

I’d say up until I was about 13 I bounced around oblivious and unmasked. Pure neurodivergent kiddo monologuing about WWE without awareness, very concerned with making sure their felt tip pens were lined up in colour order on their desk, all the while speaking to their eyelids.

Slowly, I learned that quite a lot of people reacted negatively to me, which I understand now to be neurotypical people getting a bit spooked by this full-on behaviour I displayed without any rhyme or reason.

Receiving the same negative reactions to my unfiltered self created a loop where I became more and more insular, which made me appear more and more odd to those who didn’t know me well.

Imagine being an AuDHD teenager, oblivious to your own neurodivergence, with what feels like everyone around you telling you to stop being such a weirdo, and all you can think is ‘Why do you think I am weird? What have I done?’

I fell into a few small friendship groups made up of kids who, as we grew up, also turned out to be neurodivergent or queer or both. But I found friendships overwhelming when I was younger and they soon waned. These days I want to be part of a community, whereas back then, deep down I just wanted to be left on my own to do my own thing, but I also wanted to be liked by the people I encountered day to day.

When I left university, there were no more friendship groups because there was no more structure, except for work. I muddled through my twenties knowing I was very awkward and still not understanding the root of the ‘problem’. ‘If only I could find out what it is that is wrong with me, I could fix it,’ I thought.

I was 23 when I realised that a lot of people need small talk to bond with each other. It was better to go along with the conversation about the weather than cut it short, because it seemed to make people happier. So I started preparing in advance on a Monday morning a little spiel about what I did at the weekend, to tell my colleagues. I was scripting before I knew what that was. (Alcohol also helped with the conversational side of things, but obviously that is a wildly unsustainable choice and I am proudly 18 months sober.)

A lot of what I know at 33 about socialising I have rote learned through observation, reading a ton of self-help books before I discovered my AuDHD (hello Dale Carnegie), and by having my mistakes pointed out by others. My mask makes me look like a better neurotypical than some neurotypical people, but it takes up every ounce of energy I have.

The older I got, the more I wanted friends, and the more difficult it was to make them, until I learned about my neurodivergence. When I found out about my AuDHD, I did the classic thing of reexamining my entire life through an AuDHD lens. It now seemed so obvious. What was the common denominator in every failed friendship of mine? Me. Or rather, me and my lack of self-awareness and my neurodivergence. This doesn’t absolve me of poor behaviour, and it also doesn’t absolve anyone who treated me poorly, but now I know the reasons why my behaviour was perceived as less than ideal, if that makes sense. It’s given me a lot of room to forgive myself and others.

Along with the unmasking I’ve been doing for the past two years, I’ve been trying hard to unlearn automatic reactions and behaviours that genuinely come from a place of fear, learned long ago. Being bullied has definitely left a mark. It’s easy for someone to say ‘But you’re an adult now, get over it,’ but it’s not as simple as that. One day I’ll get there.

For me, the pinnacle of friendships are the ones I can unmask in, where I don’t need to remember the bizarre rules and regulations of socialising. I am lucky that my own circumstances have allowed me to unmask safely and slowly over the last few years, which has led to finding understanding and accommodating people who support me in different areas of my life. I wish that this was the case for everyone.

I’ve noticed that seeing a friend infrequently sets off that classic AuDHD feeling of ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and I end up sort of forgetting that the person exists (not great). So, besides trying to set up reminders to contact far-flung friends more, I’ve been trying to make new friends closer to home by going to local writing groups. Doing something while socialising seems to be the key to a successful interaction for me.

My ‘circle’ is small, but it’s mine. It’s still early days, but at least I now have the confidence to bring my full unmasked self to the table. It seems I’m finally walking the tightrope!

Phew, I think that might have been my longest newsletter so far. Did you make it? Good, drink some water and have a biscuit.

Take it easy,

Ren