It is a lonely feeling to sit in a room of 50 girls, being given a speech all about the program you're all about to join and what a tight knit community we'll all be, and knowing that come Springtime you very likely still won't have made any friends or established any meaningful connections with anyone in the group. Particularly when you know you have to try anyway, and particularly when you've seen this story repeat itself again and again and again. As I was explaining to someone who is neurotypical the other day, you kind of get used to this. You kind of get used to being shunned over and over and over again no matter how many times you follow that sagely NT advice of "put yourself out there," like it's really that easy. That isn't to say it ever stops being hurtful, no, if anything it gets worse. But eventually you stop trying to avoid pain. It's going to follow you everywhere you go anyway. You can't stop it and there is nothing you can do about it. Even if you're not the type to throw yourself into situations trying to make new friends, there will always be that person at the grocery store who gives you a weird look and you know that once again, whatever is so completely WRONG about you that everyone but you can see is rearing it's ugly head again, and it's not like you can just stop going to the grocery store. It's like that dream most everyone has where you realize you've gone to school in your underwear, and you try to cover up but you can't. You can't hide it, you're constantly going to be exposed and your vulnerabilities are constantly going to take hits. But there isn't any way around it. And people will tell you, oh, you just have to keep trying. And I suppose that's true, and that's why I continue to do it, however now that we are coming up on a full decade since the last time I managed to make new friends, it's hard to take people seriously when they say that. I don't think they quite understand the magnitude of the situation. Their oversimplification of the matter is even sort of insulting. Like really, I know you think you're helping, but I think if all I needed was for someone to tell me to put myself out there, don't you think I'd have done that ten years ago? It's not like I am shy and just refuse to try. I try over and over and over again and nobody is willing to meet me in the middle.

I am tempted to write something about autism to post on my door. Telling people I desperately want to be friends with them but that I don't know what I need to do to get to know them or how to tell if they like me, or that when they smile at me and my return smile doesn't seem sincere it isn't because I don't like them but because making facial expressions is so unnatural to me and I haven't quite got each subtle difference between them all down. Or, you know, maybe I should talk to my Resident Adviser or maybe even the Diversity Peer Educator, whatever that means, and see if they can help. But you toe a fine line there because if you admit how badly you want to make friends, which you kind of have to do in order to get them to understand that your blank-faced standing-in-the-corner behavior isn't out of reluctance to participate, then you seem emotionally needy and nobody respects you or wants to hang out with you-- as I discovered last year, thankfully with people I don't think I'd have hung out with anyway. And of course then there is the risk of people assuming I am retarded or weird or that it will be more of a chore to hang out with me than it really is. Then there is the risk of being shunned even worse and not having anybody left but the people who feel sorry for me. And what kind of friendship would that be?

This was my first week in my new dorm, and this quote from Liane Holliday Wiley (Pretending to be Normal) has never before rung quite so true...

"I had convinced myself that my high IQ and high academic achievement record meant that I was strong enough to handle whatever came my way. In realty, they only worked to help me fake my way to a false sense of security, a security that vanished and left me cold with fear the moment it was overwhelmed by the reality of my AS challenges.

I was hit hard when I had realized smarts were not enough to make it in this world. I was turned upside down when I had to admit I could not find anyone who saw things like I did. I was crippled when I found out it took more than I had to give to make new friends. Looking back, it is really no wonder I was never able to build any friendships in college. I was not very good at figuring people out. And so it seems, no one was very good at figuring me out either. Without friendships, my version of friendships that is, I had very little support. Without peers to show me how to fit in and how to make the most of what I had, I could not stay connected. I foundered."