Autism

Find an activity group focused around something you enjoy - there should be plenty on campus. If there's a public event that interests you, go, even if you go alone - even if you don't interact with anyone, it will give you practice engaging in a social setting and help with your anxiety.

One trick I've found is that people like it when you like them, and expressing a small compliment on a positive quality of theirs you note can often break the ice and signal that you'd like to be friends without being too forward. It also subtly expresses that you're confident enough that they will like you enough to care about your opinion.

Use small talk to start a conversation - simply remarking on something you're both observing is a start. "Nice weather we're having, ey?" is cliche as fuck, but it works. Angel the conversation towards points of agreement. Each point of agreement further enhances the ease of communication between the two of you.

Be willing to ask how others are doing, and be willing to listen. Most people aren't too choosy with casual friendships, and as long as they feel that you like them and are somewhat interesting to be around, they'll want to hang out with you.

Acceptance, sensitivity, positivity, confidence and loyalty are generally the traits folks value most in a friend. If you hit a couple of high notes in any of those categories, that's usually the start of a friendship if you have shared interests.

Good luck - if you've got anxiety, remember that the thought of going out and doing this is much worse than the actuality. Once you're out there, it will come naturally if you relax and let folks in.

Go study computer science, find a bunch of nerds, realise you naturally click and that you’re all probably autistic. I’m half joking but for real, it’s easy to make friends with people like you. I’m lucky to be a programmer and there’s always someone obviously autistic in my team that I naturally become friends with.

It doesn’t have to be programming but embrace whatever autistic-friendly hobby you have, from chess to climbing or whatever it is, something that attracts other autistic people naturally.

As an adult, I’ve found friends from a few different places.

1. A board game meetup. My partner and I made a couple of friends this way. They were both autistic.

2. My closest friends I made at work. I work in IT and there are a lot of neurodivergent people in that field. These friends were the first people I knew I would probably have as friends for the rest of our lives. Well, besides my partner.

3. When we moved to a different country, we joined another board game group, but this one for transgender adults. This group is fairly new, but I already feel pretty good about this group.

4. My partner made a friend on Bumble, an app for finding friends. There’s also a dating side to the app, but it is kept separate from the platonic side. I also enjoy hanging out with her, but my partner definitely hangs out with her more.

Almost all of my friends are neurodivergent or suspect that they might be. I think it works best to put yourself in a situation where you can be around other people who think like you. For neurotypical people, that might be easy because most people thinking like them. For neurodivergent people, we have to find ways to make that happen.

You are the master of your SI. You must harness it to indoctrinate people into your hyperfixation. Many will fail the test, but hold firm, brother. There will come a nerd, like you, who just happens to love obscure wargames, or anthropology, or TRAINS. Become the DM of trains. Buy a bunch of set pieces and invite your uni students to open a box and build a massive train set along the desks of an empty lecture hall. Become Train Boy and you, too, shall have that which you seek.

Every time I made friends, it was in the context of some kind of common interest group.

In high school, D&D was the leading edge. One guy noticed me reading Lord of The Rings and invited me to play with his group. I met another guy in that group, who lead me to another group where I met a third guy, who lead me to another group that had nothing to do with D&D, but which is where I met a great many of my friends. And my best friend in high school (and for many years afterward) was a mutual friend with that second guy, which we didn't realize until we were comparing previous D&D campaigns and realized they both had the same DM.

The second time I made a lot of friends in my late twenties, it was in the context of an anime fan group. I had gone to a bunch of groups... a hiking group, a Diplomacy board game group, maybe a few others, and the anime group was where I found my social home for several years. The key was that I kept trying different groups until I found one that worked.

I made my best friend in collage by walking up to him and telling him I liked his coat. It took all my courage, but I had spent all of highschool just barely hanging on to the outskits of my friend group and I swore collage was going to be different. (Also it was a really sweet coat.)

From there he introduced me to a whole slew of wonderful poeple. I was able to move out of the dorms and all of us rented a big house together and it was fucking amazing! I'd never been happier. My new friends taught me how to interact with the normies, drug me to parties and showed me the ropes of true genuine social interaction and for that I am still grateful.

You just need one friend on the same wierd wavelength as you and grow from there! If you have trouble with icebreakers, or being in anyway charismatic I recommend memorising a handful of dad jokes. Especially if you have a dry, flat tone of voice. Yes, most poeple groan and roll their eyes, but the one's that don't? They are the keepers. And poeple will remember you favorably if you can make them laugh!

(Bonus joke: Did you hear about the huge sale at the Lego store? Poeple were lined up for blocks!)

All my current friends are either internet people from a different continent or some people I retained from that "difficult kids" school I was forced to go to. Those people are weird enough themselves that they have fun with Me and I have fun with them. Since then things did not work that well even though I tried hard.
People just generally do not want to spend time with me, when after-work activities are the current talk topic of the room, they switch topic when I enter.

Adults are the same, just different. They may not beat you daily at a place you can not escape aka school for the fun of it, but they still let you know that you are not one of them, that you are not welcome beyond what your work capabilities can provide.

There was a neurodiversity group at mine. I joined it, and continue the weekly sessions with them even after leaving uni.

My best friend was the only person I actually talked to in 6th grade during PE, I have no idea how it happened but I'm 90% she's somewhere on the spectrum or at least neurodivergent. We've been friends for over ten years now

Just wanted to pop in and share these free resources after reading the title. These are all evidence-based, so not some self-help mumbo-jumbo. I used these with my clients a lot when I was a caseworker.

Want to point out that I understand this isn't simple social anxiety, but some of the materials on social anxiety includes strategies for improving our social abilities and provide some great suggestions for how to engage with others, propose activities, etc.

Not going to say they will be game-changers, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to share the resources. I personally benefitted a lot from certain topics on that site, like anger and procrastination (ADHD).

Hope this comment doesn't come off the wrong way. I don't have Autism and I don't want anyone to read this like I'm trying to say I know what you're experiencing or anything. I just like to try to help when I can, and this is how I know to do it.

I have two close friends apart from those my wife brought into the relationship. I latched onto both out of necessity while going to the university. I am very bad at orientation in time and space. So I never knew which the next class was and where I had to go to. So in the first semester I had to find people with similar classes and just tag along. This was not easy since I'm also bad at identifying people. Over time the number of people I followed reduced to about four. And two of those are my best friends to this day.