/blog

My experience of friendship has always been a strange one.

Most would consider their classmates their friends. While I was certainly friendly with them, they were not the ones I hung around with outside of school. They just didn't have the same interests. Those I spent time with as a kid and a teen mostly didn't go to the same school as me.

Since then, there have been a series of distinct periods in my life where I have drifted away from those I have considered friends due to changes of circumstance — usually me living somewhere else or doing something different. I then haven't tried to stay in touch with them.

I compartmentalise.

My brain just says that part of my life is done, move on and put it behind me, and that includes the people.

During my working life, my colleagues have never been my friends. While I have always been perfectly friendly with them in the workplace I don't socialise with them outside of work. Again, different interests dictate this and the last thing I want to do is talk shop in my down time.

Conventional wisdom dictates that it is harder to make friends the older you get. Add worsening introversion and social anxiety to the mix and you've got a perfect storm.

I joke that I have no friends but many a true word said in jest as the saying goes.

Yes, I technically have IRL "friends" but they are all my wife's friends first and I come as part of the package. These are good people and we get on well but, unlike my wife, if things were to change I know I wouldn't keep in touch. And it's not just because I don't (and refuse to) use Facebook.

We were talking yesterday about my inability to converse appropriately with different people. I tend to pitch things at one consistent level but a lot of it is a front. Like a typical introvert I struggle until I really get to know someone, until then it's all wrong volume, sarcasm and bluster. Some might consider it showing off or a performance but it's more a self defence mechanism — putting up a wall until the other person breaks through. ¹

My idea of hell is going somewhere on my own, not knowing anyone, where I am expected to interact. It fills me with a sense of dread and panic which trigger the front.

It's one thing to know this about yourself but another entirely to do anything about it. Admonitions of "just be different" or "don't do it" are useless and push me in the wrong direction as I get further from being myself. Then it's no longer just a front but an exhausting falsehood.

The more I understand about autism, and see more of it in myself, the more I realise that I'm just different and not broken even though neurotypical society still sees me as such, as weird. I look back at certain events in my life, times when others have outright called me "strange" and find an element of peace in now knowing why.

# I almost forgot that today was the start of the new meds — beginning with half a pill a day for the first 1-2 weeks. I suspect it's going to be a while before I feel any effects.

While the literature says sertraline has less side effects than other SSRIs, my wife reminded me that a couple of people we know have had to stop taking it because of issues or, in the worst example, psychotic episodes.

My next appointment with the doctor will be on 18th July so I'll have been on the for just over two weeks and started on the full dose.