I’m not sure if anyone can relate to this, but I still wanted to get “my feelings out”, so to speak. I’m a psychology student from Germany who’s in a Erasmus+ year (basically an exchange year during university) in France. I think the topic of loneliness has accompanied me my whole life in one form of another, but right now I think it strikes extra hard. Generally speaking, I think I’m pretty socially competent - I have friends, a girlfriend, I’m member of a Nightline back in Germany. I know a good amount of people from uni, in Germany and France, and can have a nice smalltalk with them.
However, I don’t feel included in any specific group, here or back in Germany. I am not outright rejected, people are still nice when I e.g. sit down with them for a meal. I went to a bar with some fellow exchange students, or talked with them during lunch. But these activities drain a lot of energy from me, and I can’t go to the nice places where people bond as a group. I can’t go to parties or concerts, having lunch with other people already drains my social battery for the day. I hear them telling how they will go on a trip or a party, how they went to the city and had a nice time. Last time I was in the city I nearly had a meltdown when I got home.
It just feels really lonely, as if all the people around me have fun as a group and I stand at the edge of the party, watching them as they enjoy themselves. I could walk up to them and have a drink, but I still wouldn’t be part of the party, no matter what I really do or try, because I wouldn’t be able to get in the same “fun mood” as them. This feeling of not belonging holds on the entire day right now.
However, that doesn’t mean I’m not happy or I can’t do fun things; I absolutely can. I love it when I can sleep out and watch a nice movie, when I have a walk next to the river and listen to my podcast. I love exploring the city (with headphones!), or watching a dog play with a ball, playing PC or writing in my diary. There are nice things in my life, which I appreciate and value. However, all these things are things I do on my own or with another person. And whenever I’m in a group, I very strongly feel that I don’t really fit to the group, that they are different than me.
I already thought about joining up a group here, but my language barrier makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to do so. And with my fellow exchange students I don’t really fit in, for the reasons outlined above.
Overall, I just feel very lonely here. Like a little alien watching the others have fun, while I’m on my own somewhere different. Of course I still have fun, I do great things, but I do them on my own. I feel that I’m broken or wrong for not able to enjoy group things as much as others do, that some part of me which is supposed to function correctly doesn’t work.
You sound a lot like me. I figured it out for myself, maybe this insight will help you, maybe it won’t apply, but I’ll share.
I’m an introvert to start and on the spectrum. The world seems built for extroverts, and for a long time I thought the thing I was “supposed” to do was a bunch of extrovert activities that required me to mask my autism and drained me of all my energy. I felt a very similar feeling of being with people but feeling alone, I was in my head carefully running the scripts and behaviors I have learned. Not consciously (well, sometimes consciously) but it was just this extra burden I was carrying around that no one else was. It wasn’t a fun day at the beach without a care in the world, it was an assault on my senses, everything is too bright and too loud and sand is everywhere and “oh, what did that person just say, ugh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation. I don’t want to play volleyball but are you supposed to anyways because that’s what people do at the beach?”
Over time I found people whose interests more closely aligned with mine. People I could trust to share my true self with, and not the mask of social scripts that I had learned was what I was “supposed” to do. And I realized I was not alone, but that a lot of the activities that people commonly associated with social togetherness were just not for me.
University can be a difficult time, most of the fun to be had is in those activities that I wasn’t very compatible with. I used to think that maybe I was broken too, but now I think that I am just different, and there’s nothing wrong with different. I have friends and a wife and people that I care about and who care about me, the real me, and I don’t feel so alone anymore.
I wish the same for you, if you like exploring the city with headphones, find someone that wants to do that too. If you like watching a dog play with a ball, there are people that will want to do that with you too. I found the more I opened up to people about who I really am and stopped caring about who I was “supposed” to be, the happier I became, the less lonely I felt.
I am sorry things are difficult for you now, in my experience it does get better. Early 20s are the time when people want to party and go to concerts and be quite loud. In a decade those same people will enjoy a quiet evening at home just as much as you do now.
You my Internet friend are not broken, you are just different, and different is beautiful.
Thank you a lot! I know on a rational level as right that I’m not broken, that I’m just different. My psychology knowledge also helps a lot here, because I can contextualize my personal disorder into a more “neutral” framework and know why I feel the way I do. It sucks a lot though if basically every person I know at least to some extent goes to partys and concerts and have drinks and watch series with their friends, and for me the greatest joy is to sit next to a river and read a book. This huge difference between what I like vs what a lot of my friends like is draining.
It helps me a lot to know that I’m not alone with my experiences, and that it gets better after uni + a few years of growing older. The fact that someone can relate to my feeling makes me feel less alone and somehow validated. Thank you!
I relate to this viscerally. Throughout my life, the easiest way for me to genuinely connect with others has been through a setting where we don’t have in-person body language.
In real life I’ve usually been quite bubbly, but that’s because I’m usually quite happy and enjoy spreading positive energy. It’s much better to uplift others than to break them down.
My friend groups have ebbed and flown over the years, but ultimately something drives us apart. Most of the time I’m clueless as to why. I think it’s because people don’t want to hurt my feelings because I’m polite and they have a history with me, but don’t want to continue a friendship.
I prefer to slide in social situations where we are in a small group or one-on-one. It usually feels more substantive and brings people who don’t mind info-dumping, obsessions, and more often than not, they enjoy the impact of my neurotype on my personality. It’s not like people can’t enjoy my personality… Just a specific subset. However, I’ve never felt like I’ve truly belonged in any group either. Nerdy, but not in the archetype to where I fit in with a traditional nerd. Enjoy outdoor things, but not to the point where it defines my life, as I enjoy electronics, linguistics, and musicianship. Broad range of interests that are too esoteric can put people off from a lack of relatability.
Being German American with my heritage mostly detached, I’d say this is the case in both Germany and the US. I grew up teaching myself the language, and have held a semblance of being “German” as an ethnicity, but am very clearly culturally distinct from real German people. It’s weird to observe that both cultures forego their norms and cave into their humanity when it comes to socializing. All folks follow different strokes.
It just seems like whenever you want to put yourself out there, there’s some intangible barrier that blocks a true friendship from forming. Is it ineptness? Am I perceived as selfish by talking too much about an interest? What about the questions I ask? My responses… As I’ve gotten older I’ve cared far less about the opinions of others. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t yearn for some form of involvement. Hope you feel okay. This community has made me feel far less alien than I ever have.
Just wanted to say that I find your background really interesting. I live in the US and my older relatives came from Deutschland. They have all died by now, but I have lots of memories of the language. I have been attempting to learn the language now as an adult by myself.
I have never met anyone else in the United States who had any German family history or interest in the language. Curious which area you live in? Do you have other German speakers in your area?
Also same about not being able to maintain friendships. Maybe it’s just normal cycling as time passes and you both change. I also wonder if it’s because I have never met anyone that I could relate to or discuss my interests with. It may be that I am a low maintenance friend as well, you can contact me whenever, but some people get upset if you aren’t in nearly daily conversation.
I am middle aged but I know what you mean. As I got older I realized that I was creating the suffering.
Not fitting in can become a story that plays in your head. If you pay attention most the people around you don’t notice this or don’t care. For all you know they may feel they don’t fit in themselves either.
Even if it was true, would it really matter? I found that I was striving to meet societal expectations that weren’t things I even valued. Could it be that you feel left out because you feel pressured to meet these expectations but are just going through the motions?
Besides those typical reasons being an ausländer is going to be difficult regardless. Especially if you have autism. Maybe there just aren’t many people around that have your lived experience. That’s ok it’s a good time to meet different types of people. When you get back home you have the rest of your life to meet people you have more in common with.
That’s actually a thought I had myself for a long time and on which I’d love to elaborate a bit more.
In psychotherapy (and CBT especially), there is a model where our thoughts create our feelings. Epictetus wrote two thousand years ago that “not the events make us suffer, but our judgment of them”. I think that’s an interesting approach, but I also think there are strong limitations. Some example can be obvious - like when a person is hungry, it wouldn’t be a good idea to tell a person " you’re suffering because you think you shouldn’t be hungry", but some can also be a bit less obvious. E.g. I am part of the queer community and sometimes get catcalled on the street. I could argue with myself now that I “make myself upset” about it and I create unnecessary suffering in my head, but that would to some extent shift the creator of the hurt they caused onto me. Like I would try to convince myself that part of the reason why I’m hurt is because I have the belief I shouldn’t be hurt by them catcalling me, and I think that’s a very dysfunction approach.
I think what heavily matters is how much I do suffer. If someone would catcall me and I’d grab a gun and kill the person, that would hardly be proportional. In this case, I would definitely at least to some extent have cognition’s which contribute to my suffering in a way which is avoidable.
Coming back on to the topic, what I’m interested in is where “the line” of an appropriate emotional response would be for me. I feel excluded and don’t really belong; I think that’s to some extent true, and it’s also okay that I don’t feel good about it. However, how much is appropriate? Should I just feel a bit isolated? Should I be sad now and then? Should I cry myself into bed every night?
The point for me is connected with the question how I should proceed. I absolutely feel the pressure to conform to society. But how much pressure (and suffering from not abiding) is appropriate? And is the amount of pain and sadness I feel extremely high? If yes, then I probably at least have some influence on a part of the suffering. If not, I risk trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t be sad feeling excluded and lonely, and that it isn’t that bad, etc.
Tl;dr - do I create the suffering myself or do is it a normal response of my psyche, and it would be self-hurting to convince myself that I create this suffering myself?
I find it uncomfortable not to understand. It has taken me decades to make peace with the notion that being different is not only acceptable, but good. Many people don’t get me, but the ones who do become friends for life. Many people find things interesting or enjoyable that would make me cry from boredom.
I’ve chosen to find it charming.
You might be able to do that, too. If not now, then one day. It took me a long time.
Peace.
I’m 47 in the US, and I have felt this way most of my adult life. In my teens and 20s, I always felt like an afterthought. I’d ask to be included to group events, and I rarely remember ever being invited. I’d try to chime in when people were talking, but what I’d say never quite seemed to land right. The microexpressions on people’s faces indicated to me that I wasn’t a social equal but that I was simply being tolerated.
It didn’t even occur to me that I was autistic until I was 39, and it took until I was 46 for me to get myself diagnosed with ASD1. But I’ll tell you…something happened in my 30s. I don’t know what it was exactly that changed things for me in this regard, probably a multitude of things, but I am no longer the person I was in my 20s.
Maybe it was the fact that I got two degrees. Or that I was married for 17 years (now divorced, but it was my decision) and have two great kids. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I developed a career as a teacher and have felt pride in the accomplishments I’ve made in my vocation. Or maybe it was just the passage of time that allowed me to develop coping mechanisms that work for me…time that tempered my worries about myself and my place in this world among others.
Whatever transpired, I’m no longer the sort of person who cares what people think of me. Of course, I always aim to be the best version of myself, someone people will admire and recognize as a safe, consensual, trauma-informed person, so I do want people to consider me a good and decent person.
But I can never control their perception of me as an autistic person. I’m different. Everyone knows it when they get to know me. When I discovered at age 39 that I was likely autistic, I told my colleagues, and they were shocked that I didn’t already know that about myself because they all clocked me as autistic pretty much immediately after meeting me three years prior.
So, instead of trying to hide it better in order to fit in. I wear my autism right on my sleeve. I tell people “When I’m in a group and say something awkward, and I can see the awkwardness on their faces 🤨, I just respond with ‘🫤😯…I…I’M AUTISTIC. 😬🙃’ And then everyone goes 'OH! Okay, that’s what it is, gotcha…I knew it was something like that! 😁”.
By telling people this, it let’s them know my sense of humor about my condition and sets them (and me) up for awkwardness in the future. Because it’s going to happen. Not all my jokes will land. Sometimes I’m gonna chime into a conversation and my comment will completely flop. But my out can always be “'🫤😯…I…I’M AUTISTIC. 😬🙃”. They’ll remember that my awkward comment isn’t my fault, that it’s this wacky thing about my brain and the way it works, and they won’t just sit their with a weird look on their face trying to figure out how to move past what I’ve just said. They’ll laugh, because I can laugh at myself! And I don’t feel so alone any more. I get invited to parties, and I’m included in the conversation.
Beyond having a sense of humor about yourself, the best advice I can give is to learn how to really listen, ask questions, and care about the responses and the people who give them. Low self-worth has been a constant companion in my life. I rarely felt valued, so I tried to create value among others by providing them with entertainment…being the funny one, or having off-the-wall talents (developed through periods of hyperfixation). I know now that my worth as a person can only be evaluated by me, and I know that I am as valuable as a human being as anyone else is, regardless of what I provide others.
That being said, what brings me great joy is being considered a friend and confidant, someone people value as a companion. And I foster that by caring about them, their experiences, and their feelings. I listen to them…really listen…not just waiting to say what I want to say in response, but thinking of questions I can ask, considering how their experiences make them feel, and proferring up advice when it is requested.
Anyway, that’s a lot. Off to work. Good luck to you!
I sincerely appreciate your response, thank you! I think it matters a lot to me that I’m not alone with this and that it will change (I’m sure it will also change for me, goddammit).
For me it definitely is an open question of integration vs. letting other people know I’m autistic. Rn only a selected number of people know, but it definitely is an unsolved problem for me if I want to be more open with this part of my identity. In the end it is a bit like what you said, that then people can also understand one better and won’t wonder ‘why is this guy behaving weirdly?’
Listening is definitely a great skill as well - I want to become a psychotherapist, so that will kinda become my source of income :) Always good to cultivate this skill though!
Actually now that I think of it, maybe I’ve neglected it a bit. Listening for me is something I claim to be able to do well, and something where I can use the autistic part of my identity well. And also that brings me to a thought. We all like and love people who can listen well and who will be there for you. I know that a few years ago, I read Carnegie’s “How to make friends and influence people” (honestly, how I didnt realize back then already that I was autistic is beyond me), but the main message of the book is that people like other people who listen. And listening to other people actually made me friends with a lot of other people. Being focused and attentive and going deep into a subject is an area I can perfectly integrate my hyper fixation and care for details, while also making the other person feel appreciated. Of course, there needs to be a fine line, but now that I think of it - I don’t feel connected going to a large party, I feel connected sitting next to a friend and listening him talking about his breakup. That’s what gives me a feeling of being part of the party, because that’s a party I choose and a party I can be damn good at.
In the last few years however it feels that I’ve neglected this a bit; it feels to me that I don’t really listen how I did earlier. I’m gonna reflect on why that’s the case, and maybe I’ll reread Carnegie. But I have the feeling that maybe, just maybe, this is connected to my feeling of feeling left out. Maybe I don’t only feel left out from the others, but also left out from myself, because I no longer practice the craft and art of listening like I did earlier.
I’ll need to reflect upon it, a lot. But thank you for the input! I sincerely appreciate it. Maybe I’ve written a lot of dumb stuff down, but at least I’ve a new thought to go with, and that’s already worth a lot. Thank you!
