making friends

23 Aug, 2026

I’ve always been someone who kept to himself. During my early childhood, I was an only-child who spent his afternoons playing with his toys and dolls, watching handicraft shows and imitating them, drawing, coloring, or reading. I saw kids at my kindergarten and later school with which I got along well, I would say, but this never materialized in after-school activities. My mom wouldn’t push the issue and I didn’t ask for it either.

My friend and cousin who was two years older than me would spend most of her time at my paternal grandma’s across the corridor from us because her mom worked and there was no daycare available. My mom and grandma didn’t get along well, always making us out to be a burden, so I didn’t get to play with her that much. On my mother’s side, I was the only kid which meant I received a lot of adult attention, but very little from people my age. I didn’t crave it that much—I cared more about spending time with specific people than people in general—, but in hindsight I can see that it would’ve altered my development. Anyway, the result was that I learned to be content with just being by myself doing my creative things after my schoolwork.

It is always hard to be plucked out of your familiar environment and placed in another, but it is especially so for a kid. When we moved countries to a place I vaguely knew existed on a map, it was hard coming to terms with that. I already didn’t understand the people I was surrounded by where I came from; how was I supposed to understand these virtual aliens with their nasal language that I couldn’t decipher? It is safe to say I was lonelier than ever, without even the retreat of my maternal grandma’s hug. Even when you don’t understand what a kid is saying, you can tell that they’re gossiping about you, saying „funny“ things to their friends in the sure knowledge that you can’t understand them. There was one kid who spoke my language, however, he wasn’t too keen on easing me into the new environment by just being my friend. He preferred his own friends he’d known for years by then over the foreign, clingy, and endlessly anxious kid, which I understand. But he didn’t have to be an asshole and make fun of me thinking my not understanding what he was saying meant I didn’t know what he was doing. Maybe it was my anxiety speaking, though, and he wasn’t making fun of me.

I knew that for my social life to be anything to speak of, I had to master the language to pass as one of the in-group, which I did. Soon enough, I moved upwards to a middle school and it was a fresh start for everyone. It was hard at first, but I began actually making friends! By the end of the year, it didn’t matter next to whom I sat, I always found a way to do everything else but listen to the teacher. I had ADHD and nobody, including me, knew. I had a spotless grade average so no teacher really complained to my parents. Yeah, the kid’s a chatterbox, but they said it in an endearing and playfully reprimanding way, with me translating it to my parents, of course. Core immigrant experience, I guess.

That middle school was always meant to be a stepping stone on my path to a better school. My ambitions blinded me from seeing what I was leaving behind until I was in the middle of a mess of my own making: a new school where everyone was already part of their own cliques. I remember walking up to my class teacher, holding back tears, asking whether it was possible to switch back. That’s how bad it was. I was a class clown in the making, a foreigner with his own peculiarities, had good grades, and loved to talk back to teachers.¹ I was still incapable of reading the room and an enigma. Not because I was #mysterious, but because I didn’t fit the stereotype of my own ethnicity. I was poor at a school for rich kids in a wealthy part of the city and at a disadvantage with everybody already befriended so I had to put in double and thrice the work to make this work. Eventually, I secured a friendship with the person who is still my best friend to this day and we proceeded to build (Is that the word?) a shaky friend group of four.

After the exhausting process of befriending people at the new school and finally finding a group to which I belonged, I didn’t consider expanding my friend horizon for quite some time. I was content with what I had and the same applied to my friends, I think. After the lockdowns, we had diverged enough from the rest (because we hadn’t kept in touch) that we weren’t invited to parties of any kind or even just to hang out at the park during lunch break. We never made the effort to include ourselves either.

Maybe I’m autistic as well, but the answer doesn’t interest me anymore. Making friends is a muscle and mine was both at a disadvantage from being the poor, weird nerd born elsewhere and atrophied from disuse in my childhood. That’s the explanation I accept, for now. My social anxiety in high school and the lack of approachable and/or interesting people my age made it so I never pursued further relationships. But once you are content with never seeking it out, you unlearn how little you knew of doing it. It takes a lot of effort to walk the smallest of steps in that regard when needed and once you do, even the smallest setback feels like a battle lost so you try even less.

Nothing in my school days prepared me for making friends in university which felt like a cosmic test to my sanity. I was shy and speaking to strangers felt so against my nature. In truth, I was scared of rejection (still am, but to a lesser extent when it comes to befriending). But I was more scared of being all alone in lecture halls, so I still tried. The test to my sanity part is when conversation felt easy, we were on the same page (in terms of values), we said „Let’s see each other soon!“ reciprocated with a „Definitely!“, and then I would reach out, but nothing comes of it. The weak bond would fizzle out to be one of lecture companionship, nothing more.

It’s better now that I have a couple of good friends, some okay, but distant friends, and acquaintances who I can chat with in person if need be. I have online friends now, a type of friend I never pursued until starting this blog, and even then it pursued me other than the other way around.² My friends are not all part of one or two friend groups which is perfect for me because a falling out between two wouldn’t come between the rest. But I can’t lie: the path here was so hard. And it is harder still to keep some of the new relationships afloat because of my problems with making plans.