Realization: I Have No Social Life

Post Reply New Topic

So, I finally realized: I haven't had legitimate 'friend' or really hung out with anyone outside of school or work since I graduated high school back in 2009. That's coming up on almost three years ago, now. Sure, there were classmates and coworkers I was friends with since then, but we never hung out or did anything together out side of work or school. I suppose it's at least in part my own damn fault, really; considering the academic path I chose to pursue, and my less-than-part-time job, but that's just how it worked out.

After high school s**t fell apart. All my friends went their separate ways, to separate colleges and separate jobs; some of them even moving out of state. Others just dropped off the face of the map completely, and I never hear more than a few vague details every few months about their whereabouts and goings-on, before I stopped hearing anything at all.

The people that were my friends that stuck around quickly became like strangers to me. I saw them every so often at parties my brother held at our house, but that was it. We would talk for a bit, and then move on; no real meaningful or interesting conversations. I just don't enjoy house parties. All the people I didn't know made me reluctant to socialize with the ones I did, assuming I could drag their attention away from the alcohol, hookah, or beer pong. Most of the time I just avoided the party in the basement all together. I already knew there wouldn't be anything of any real interest to me down there, anyway; just crappy music, a bunch of noisy drunks, and the cold, stale, permeating smell of alcohol.

I kept working the same dead-end job every Friday and Saturday, week-in and week-out, whether or not I wanted to. I was friends with a few of my coworkers, but it was always contained to the workplace. Even at the yearly company party, they felt a bit more like strangers. They had their own lives, and I had mine, and that was just how it was. Informal business relationships, but still business ones, none the less. Same with going to a commuter school- everyone from all over the metro, and no one lives anywhere close to anyone else. Hardly a situation that promotes extracurricular friendships.

Now, having moved, I'm unemployed, not attending college, and still living with my parents. All I'm doing now is volunteering three days a week at a grassroots organization for social justice and equality. Same thing there. I'm friends with a lot of the other volunteers there, but it's all informal business. Most of them have such busy schedules (going to college, working, and volunteering) that finding time to do something outside of the organization would be nearly impossible, anyway.

Yeah... I'm just sitting here at my computer wondering what happened; when exactly I let my social life die a slow, accidental death. Wondering what it would take for me to resuscitate it at this point. Living inside my head.

Zokk. its ok we are all in the same boat here. Sometimes I wish all Aspies on earth found an island in the Pacific Ocean and made our own country with our own flag so at least we would have someone 24/7 to relate to .

First congratulations on volunteering in something you're passionate about.
Question: are you actually unhappy about it?
The reason I ask this is because I've been pretty much the same since I graduated in 1987 and I'm not even bothered by it.
I have acquaintances I hang out with sometimes but I don't have many close friends that I hang out with regularly.
Occasionally I force myself to be more social but my default mode is work - recharge - work.

If you really need to be more social then you'll probably have to join groups with that focus (singles activity groups) for example.
You might have to host a party/bbq/whatever or two at your house (12/21/12 is a great opportunity but a while off) to make it happen.

Why did you stop attending college?

Thanks. While it's not my goal in life, like it is for the full-time volunteers/organizers, I've met a lot of really great people by doing it.

On a day-to-day basis? Not really. Stepping back and looking at my situation, though, I'm rather dissatisfied with the state of my life right now. But I don't really have the financial means or social connections to get my life together anytime soon, either.

I ran out of money to pay for film school, and then moved here to California. The irony is amazing. And to head off the question: "Why not just go back to school here?", it's because the local colleges don't have the kind of film programs that would keep me motivated to graduate from them. I pretty much need a film apprenticeship to do that. And there's only one of those, and it would involve either commuting two or three hours each way three days a week, or moving into a really expensive city instead.

Well there's your problem my friend! You're making one of the many mistakes I made at about the same time in my life. You can step back and look at the big picture of your life, and it may never look the way you planned it to be. (Joke: How do you make God laugh? Show him your plans.) That's what a mid-life crisis is all about, and you're supposed to be a lot older before you have them. The big picture doesn't matter a bit, because it's today that you're living, and if you can live today in a reasonably happy or content way, you've got it made.

My answer to making friends and developing a social life (I mean, if that's the sort of thing you really want - be careful what you wish for) is to do what you absolutely love doing. My grandpa taught me that I should choose a career like that. Well, that didn't work out, but doing what I love as a non-career thing has always made all the difference when it comes to finding good friends - the only kind of friends worth all the hassle and stress - unless what you're really looking for is connections.

I went through a really painful period when I was weighed down every day by the fact that I was working full-time for just over minimum wage (heavy, back-breaking factory work it was), and what for? So someone else could make a profit by using me as a machine on their assembly line? I had never had a girlfriend either, and my one guy friend was still in high school when I was 22. I didn't realize at the time that on any given day I was usually doing just fine. There were a few head-bangers like me working at the factory too (this was like 1986-88), and we really did have fun at work. I went home and played my cheap guitar, scratched my cat's ears, maybe bought another Iron Maiden LP, made some supper, watched a little TV, nothing special, certainly nothing awful, though I wasn't a rock star, a pilot, a scientist, or popular, and it seemed I never would be. But in hindsight, I was happy most of the time, and young, strong, & healthy. I was mostly impatient and worried that things would never change.

Today part of me wishes they hadn't changed. Today I'm a semi-pro rock musician, a licensed pilot who can't fly because I take psych meds, and a neuroscientist with a PhD, several published papers, but I've also got a psychotherapist, a psychiatrist, no job (science or otherwise), two social workers who visit me at home twice a week, a monthly social security check, both Medicare and Medicaid, an ex-wife, an ex-girlfriend (who is only an ex because she committed suicide), and diabetes. I've done my best with my three career plans (aviation, science, & music), though they didn't pan out. But today I have more friends than I ever dreamed of having. I don't get paid to do what I love doing (except for the occasional music gig - once a month or so these days), but I'm still doing what I love, and doing what I love is how I've found nearly all of my best friends. (More on that in a bit.)

In 1988 I left that factory job and moved to Nashville to start a prog/metal band with an old high school friend. I found a job there doing the same awful work for even less money. Sometimes all I could afford to eat was spaghetti noodles & salt. We practiced 3-5 nights a week for a year and a half, and in the end we only played a total of 6 gigs, most unpaid, and one 2-night stand where we were expected to pay the bar each night to play. But the day I got fired from my day job because I needed to go to band practice instead of working a double shift, I realized that life was awesome! I was free! I was doing what I loved, and that gave me all the direction I needed in life. I wasn't there to be a slave to the almighty dollar - I was there to create the most amazing and artistic rock music possible, and though no one else cared in the music world, I cared. 3-5 nights every week I had an awesome seat to an amazing live rock concert, the only times in history that music has been or will be performed live.

We played one show for a charity event (meaning that we weren't paid), promoted by the biggest radio station in town. We got great publicity. We headlined the ten-act event. The emcee kept building us up between acts, and when we took the stage, suddenly the crowd exploded from about a dozen (not kidding) to over 400, and we played the most extraordinary show on that day in the spring of 1989 that I've ever been a part of! The crowd went nuts, and a guy from CBS records wanted to talk to us after the show. (It never happened because of... well, that's a long story for another time.) The point is that it was possibly the happiest moment of my life when we were playing that show. Nothing really came of it career-wise, and the show only raised about $800 of the $50,000 needed (for a baby's liver transplant that wasn't covered by insurance then), but for the rest of my life I'll know what it's like to have had a taste of being a rock star for about 45 minutes. IMO, that is the primary benefit to doing what you love, even if you don't get paid. The friends will follow as a nice side benefit.

Living life in the "now" is something I think we aspies are good at. We're not the greatest at making plans and following through, and as kids we were less likely to have engaged in imaginative play. Things that aren't real and in front of us can be difficult to find meaningful. But that which is real and in front of us we can experience with an intensity that NTs can only imagine. That show I just described is burned into my brain as if it just happened. I can close my eyes and experience it all over again. I can hear it vividly across the 23 years that have passed, and I can tell you each piece of equipment in each person's set-up, what they were wearing, and who used hair spray for the first time in his life (as well as who was experienced with the hair spray, and which of us that wouldn't go near the stuff). Our intensity with living in the present can burn strong emotional memories that we can bring out later in life if we're bored.

So now that my career has pretty much collapsed altogether, I have plenty of time but not much desire to do things unless I feel passion or intensity about them. Honestly, I love making music, and I have made a lot of really high quality friends just by going out for karaoke. When I sing (or play an instrument), it can be an out-of-body experience for me. I might or might not sound all that great (I only recently started singing), but I absolutely love it. I used to sit alone at the bar at my favorite karaoke place, but after a while some people began to talk to me. One thing led to another, and a whole bunch of them are now my friends. They come and see plays I've worked on, or my occasional gig. I spent Sunday afternoon with one of those friends, having lunch at a local deli and then just chatting at a Barnes and Noble. They all know I'm autistic. They all know I have serious psych issues. They all know my girlfriend committed suicide, and that I recently got so depressed I didn't go out with them for a few months, and that I was also hospitalized in February so I could have electric shock therapy (now called ECT). I went out again for karaoke last night and saw most of them for the first time in months, and they were all so happy to see me, and glad that the ECT helped. They didn't get freaked out or go away. They weren't even fazed. Nor were they angry or resentful that I had dropped out for so long. They were just happy to see me again, and happy that I was ok. They are the friends I made by being completely up-front about who I am and by doing something I love. They are true friends. They just think my craziness is part of what makes me such an interesting friend. They are forgiving of my occasional stupid mistakes, and usually I'm laughing along with them. Don't they just sound like the most ideal kind of friends? It blows my mind that they care so much about me. Being an aspie all my life, I got pretty used to not having friends, or having friends that I was always worried would leave when they learned I was all weird.

When I'm in a band, my band-mates are like family. I think most non-classical musicians would say the same thing. We all came together through auditions because we all share the same love and passion for music, and we all have a common goal. We establish up-front what we're looking for, and we're honest about whether we think it would be a good match. Many current and former band-mates are also great friends. We became friends by doing what we loved.

Doing what we love has a way of sorting us into groups of people who will most likely get along.

Another angle comes from my work in theater. While I'm working on a show, the cast and crew become like yet another family. Occasionally some of us will go out after rehearsal or a performance for food or drinks. (With theater people, it's usually the latter...) I get sad and depressed when a show finally closes. I know I almost never hang out with people after a show closes, so I'll probably not see them again unless we randomly come together on another show. You might not call that having real friends, but I kinda like the idea of having friends for a specified amount of time. In a way, that's a sort of aspie dream, IMO. You know how it's going to end, so there's no fear of losing those friends. You know up front that they are going to go away on a certain date, and that makes room for the next batch. I read a quote by Marilyn Monroe, who said, "I believe everything happens for a reason... things fall apart to make room for better things to come together."

(I'll let her have the last word.)

Man, there's so much in there that I can agree with and understand where you're coming from and all that...

I'll just toss out the major ones.

I think I've always know that, but it became a lot more apparent when I became a teenager. All my friends have been friends I made through common interests and participating in those interests together. Me, myself; my true passion is storytelling; writing and filmmaking, in particular. That's what I want to do with my life, ideally, one way or another, is to tell stories. It's what I do naturally; it's what I'm good at. I seem to have five major interests: Writing, filmmaking, music, history, and animal care. If I can make a living from any of those and have the others as hobbies, I'd be more than happy with that.


That's almost exactly my situation this time last year. Seriously...


That's where I've been at now for the past year or so now. More and more often, I've been catching myself wondering when and how I can get my life moving forward again; start making progress towards the kind of life I want to be living in the future. Talking with my parents, it been either "get a job" or "go back to school" or both. Well, where are all the jobs? And given my academic track record, what school has either an intellectually engaging history program that doesn't grade on homework, or a hands-on apprenticeship program for aspiring filmmakers? Point me to one that isn't ridiculously expensive or ridiculously far away, and I'll jump on it. Until then, well, I'm kind of out of luck...


And that's my problem when it comes to school. If I see no immediate gratification for my efforts on a mundane task or assignment, then I just tend to drop it or ignore it until it's too late. I need a concrete, short term goal to be able to complete grunt-work assignments. It's been my academic downfall since elementary school. It's why I pretty much flunked out of my community college's digital 'filmmaking' program (in quotes because it was kind of a joke, considering what we had to work with) and then technical school a year later. I almost didn't graduate high school on time because of it, and even then, my GPA was only a 2.3...

Kind of off-topic, but you're from St. Paul? I just moved from the east metro to here in California back in August.