Put me in front of a room and I'll be fine. Better than fine. I can work a conference crowd, run a meeting, make a table of strangers laugh inside ten minutes. I did it for years as the CEO of a web agency, Raincity Studios, in Vancouver and Shanghai. Clients, staff, investors, journalists. I was good at it.
And I'm in my mid-fifties and my close friends are far away. Hours of driving, or a time zone or three. I moved too many times for it to go any other way. Nobody down the road, nobody I see day to day.
Both of those are true at the same time. For a long time I thought that was a contradiction. Turns out they're two different skills, and the second one has always cost me more.
So here's the plain answer to the question. You can be social and still have no close friends because performing in a group and being known by one person run on different skills. The first is about energy, timing and reading people. The second is about showing up again and again, being honest, and letting someone see the parts that aren't funny. A lot of us get very good at the first one precisely so we never have to do the second.
The room is a stage
Here's what "running a room" actually looked like from inside my head.
Scanning. Constantly. Who's bored, who's lost, who's about to say something dumb that I need to rescue. When to tell the story, when to ask the question, when to laugh. How long I've been talking. Whether my face is doing the right thing.
That's a lot of work. People saw a guy who was relaxed and loved being there. Some nights I was enjoying it, I'm not going to pretend I wasn't. But a lot of the time I was running a program.
I didn't know I had ASD until I was 50. Looking back, a lot of that program was what the National Autistic Society calls masking: a strategy, conscious or not, to appear non-autistic. They also list what it costs. Exhaustion, a loss of the sense of who you are, and, the line that got me, feeling isolated and disconnected from people. That's the odd part. You can be surrounded the whole night and come home having connected with nobody, because the person they met wasn't quite you.
(I wrote more about this in is being the life of the party a form of masking?)
Why closeness scares me more than a crowd
A crowd is safe. Everybody gets a slice of me and nobody gets the whole thing. I control the pace. I can leave.
One person is different. One person asks a second question. Remembers what I said last month. Notices when I'm off. And somewhere in there my alarm goes off.
I've got a long habit of leaving before I can be left. The minute something starts to feel like it matters, I find a reason. I get busy. I decide they're not that interesting after all. I keep things on work, on ideas, on stuff that's safe to talk about, so we never get to the real material. Then I'm surprised when they drift. I'm not proud of it. I go into the roots of it in why I leave before I can be left.
It doesn't help that being the fun guy works so well. People like the performance. So there's this fear underneath: if they meet the actual me, the one who's tired and anxious and sometimes can't leave the house, will they still want to hang around? Easier not to find out.
The cost of the fear
I used to think the cost was just loneliness. There's more to it.
When depression hit hard, the people who knew me best were far away, and the people around me every day only knew the guy from the room. On the phone, from that far, it's easy to say I'm fine. Up close, nobody had seen me without the mask, so nobody noticed. That's dangerous for someone with my history, and I don't say that for drama.
There's also a broader pattern here, especially for men. In a 2021 survey by the Survey Center on American Life, only 21% of men said they'd had emotional support from a friend in the past week, against 41% of women. Plenty of us are surrounded and unsupported at the same time.
What I'm doing differently (slowly)
No tidy fix. A few things I'm practising:
Quieter settings. I'm better one-on-one with something to do (a walk, a job, a coffee) than at a big event where I go straight into performance mode.
Letting one true thing out. Not the whole autobiography. Just one sentence that's real. "Honestly I've been having a rough month." Then watch what happens. Most of the time, nothing bad. Sometimes the other person says something real back. That's how closeness starts, as far as I can tell.
Catching the exit. When I notice myself building the case for why this person isn't worth the effort, I try to at least ask whether that's real or whether it's the old alarm.
Getting help with the fear itself. This isn't just a social skills thing. Fear of rejection that runs this deep is worth bringing to a therapist. If you're in Québec, a CLSC or 811 can get you started.
And more of the practical side is in close friends, just none close by.
I still go into a room and turn the dial up. Probably always will. But I'm trying to have at least one place in my life where I can turn it down and someone stays.