When You Don’t Quite Fit: Neurodivergence, Friendship and the Teenage Years

There is something particularly difficult about being a teenager who feels different. The teenage years are often talked about as a time for finding your people, becoming more independent and working out who you are. Friendships become incredibly important, social lives become more complicated and there are suddenly unwritten rules about what to wear, what to say, who to sit with, how quickly to reply, what is embarrassing and what apparently isn’t.

For autistic teenagers, teenagers with ADHD and those with both autism and ADHD, navigating all of that can be exhausting and, at times, very lonely.

When friendships suddenly become complicated

Friendships in childhood can be relatively straightforward. You play the same game, like the same thing or sit next to each other at school, and a friendship develops. As children move into adolescence, relationships often become much more nuanced. There are group chats, shifting friendship groups, sarcasm, subtle changes in tone and increasingly complicated social hierarchies. Someone can say that everything is fine while behaving in a way that suggests it very much isn’t.

An autistic teenager might find themselves trying to work out rules that everyone else seems to know instinctively. What does that message actually mean? Was that sarcasm? Why is somebody suddenly behaving differently when nothing obvious has happened?

For teenagers with ADHD, friendships can be difficult for different reasons. They may interrupt when excited, talk intensely, forget to reply to messages or struggle to organise plans. They might become incredibly close to someone very quickly or feel a disagreement or perceived rejection intensely.

Teenagers with both autism and ADHD may recognise aspects of both, and sometimes their needs can feel contradictory: wanting spontaneity but needing predictability, craving company but becoming overwhelmed by it, or impulsively saying something and then analysing it for hours afterwards.

None of this means neurodivergent teenagers cannot form close, meaningful and lasting friendships. Many do, but finding the people you can genuinely relax with and be yourself around isn’t always easy, particularly during the teenage years.

Being surrounded by people and still feeling alone

Loneliness doesn’t necessarily mean having nobody around you. Some neurodivergent teenagers have friends, attend school every day and appear socially connected, but still feel somehow separate from the people around them. They may spend much of the day monitoring themselves: Was that the right thing to say? Am I talking too much? Do they actually want me here? Was that a joke? Have I messaged too much? Why haven’t they replied?

There can be a huge amount of thinking going on underneath an interaction that looks completely ordinary from the outside. Following a fast-moving group conversation, trying not to interrupt, working out whether someone is joking, noticing that you’ve missed part of what somebody said or wondering whether you’ve talked for too long can all take effort.

When social interaction involves this much conscious thought, being with people isn’t necessarily relaxing, and sometimes being alone is the only time a young person stops having to think about how they are coming across.

The pressure to fit in

Teenagers are extraordinarily good at noticing difference. For a neurodivergent young person, this can mean gradually learning that some of their natural behaviours attract attention. Perhaps they talk enthusiastically about something they love, move, stim or communicate differently, struggle with noise, food, clothing or crowds, or are impulsive, forgetful or disorganised. They might miss a joke, take something literally or find it difficult to know when it is their turn to speak.

Teenagers also notice when other teenagers notice, so some begin to adapt. They watch other people and copy them, rehearse conversations, suppress stims, try desperately not to interrupt and pretend that noise isn’t bothering them. They laugh when everyone else laughs and push themselves through situations they find overwhelming because everyone else appears to manage them.

This is often described as masking. It isn’t exclusive to autism; ADHD can be masked too, and teenagers with both autism and ADHD may be trying to conceal several different areas of difficulty at once. Masking isn’t always obvious either. The chatty, funny or high-achieving teenager can be masking, as can the teenager who appears completely confident with their friends but comes home exhausted by the effort involved.

From the outside, masking can look like coping. From the inside, it can feel like constantly checking whether the person you naturally are is socially acceptable, and that can be incredibly isolating.

“But they seem fine at school”

This is something I hear frequently. Some teenagers hold everything together throughout the school day and then come home completely depleted. They may disappear into their bedroom, put their headphones on, game for hours, avoid talking or have absolutely no interest in another activity or family outing. Sometimes they become irritable or emotional over something that may seem relatively small.

It can be tempting to focus on the behaviour we can see, but sometimes a more useful question is what has it taken for them to get through the day?

A busy secondary school asks an enormous amount of a neurodivergent brain. There is noise, crowded corridors, changing classrooms, different teachers, social interaction, remembering equipment, concentrating, managing time, interpreting instructions, sitting still, switching attention, coping with unexpected changes and somehow keeping track of homework at the same time.

Different teenagers will find different parts of this difficult. For some it is predominantly sensory. For others it is the organisational demands, the social side, the constant transitions or the sheer amount of concentration involved. For teenagers with both autism and ADHD, there can also be the frustrating experience of needing structure while finding it incredibly difficult to maintain that structure.

Alongside all of that is the ordinary emotional and social complexity of being a teenager. By the time they get home, there may simply be very little left. Retreating afterwards isn’t necessarily a rejection of family life or a sign that a teenager needs to be pushed into doing more; sometimes it is recovery. The difficulty may come when recovery gradually becomes isolation.

When home becomes the only safe place

For some teenagers, their world slowly becomes smaller. Going out can feel difficult, so they stay home, while school can take so much from them that weekends become almost entirely about recovering.

There is an important distinction here because a teenager spending time alone is not automatically a problem. Some neurodivergent teenagers genuinely need more solitude. Gaming, reading, drawing, watching familiar programmes, engaging with a special interest or talking to friends online may be meaningful ways of regulating and connecting, and online friendships can be real and important friendships too.

It’s important not to turn introversion, special interests or a need for recovery into something that needs fixing. It can, however, be helpful to stay curious about whether a teenager is choosing solitude because it feels good, or whether they have stopped believing that there is anywhere outside their bedroom where they really fit. Those are very different things.

Rejection can leave a mark

Many neurodivergent teenagers have already experienced years of feeling corrected, misunderstood or simply a little out of step with the people around them. They may have heard that they are too sensitive, too literal, too quiet, too loud, too blunt or too disorganised, or that they need to try harder, join in more, stop interrupting or calm down.

Sometimes nobody says anything at all. It is the look someone gives you, not being invited, realising there is another group chat without you in it or watching a friendship group make plans while knowing you probably won’t be included. Some young people experience bullying, while others aren’t overtly bullied but repeatedly find themselves on the edge of friendship groups, wondering why they never quite seem to make it into the middle.

Over time, those experiences can change the way you approach relationships. If you have repeatedly felt unwanted or misunderstood, it makes sense that you might become more alert to signs that it is happening again. A delayed message can feel significant, two friends meeting without you can hurt enormously, and walking into a room where you don’t immediately know where to sit can suddenly feel like a very big thing. Sometimes there is much more behind the reaction than whatever has happened that day.

Is it autism, ADHD, anxiety, or all three?

This is where things can become complicated because avoidance isn’t always anxiety. Not wanting to attend a loud party might be about sensory overload. Wanting to go but repeatedly not managing to get there might involve organisation, uncertainty or overwhelm. A teenager might desperately want the social connection while also knowing how exhausted they are likely to feel afterwards.

Of course, neurodivergent teenagers can experience anxiety too, and if social situations have repeatedly been confusing, overwhelming or painful, it isn’t surprising that anxiety can begin to creep in.

Rather than immediately asking, “How do we get them to do more?”, it can sometimes be more helpful to ask, “What is making this difficult?” It might be sensory overload, uncertainty, fear of judgement, executive functioning, previous rejection, exhaustion, social anxiety or simply not having found people with whom they feel comfortable. Often it is more than one thing, and understanding what is happening underneath the behaviour gives us a much better chance of offering support that actually feels supportive.

Finding your people can take time

One of the hardest things about adolescence is that your social world can feel both enormous and incredibly small. School may contain hundreds of people, but you haven’t chosen any of them.

For some neurodivergent young people, things change when their world gets bigger. They find people who communicate like they do and discover communities built around gaming, music, art, coding, books, sport, animals or whatever happens to make their brain light up. They may meet other autistic people, people with ADHD or those with both and experience the relief of not having to explain certain things quite so much.

Later, college, university, work, hobbies and wider communities can offer more choice about who you spend time with, and the characteristics that make somebody stand out painfully at fourteen can look very different at twenty-four.

That doesn’t make the loneliness of adolescence insignificant, and telling a lonely fourteen-year-old that they’ll find their people eventually isn’t particularly helpful when they’re struggling now. But struggling to find your place in one particular school, friendship group or stage of life doesn’t mean there is something fundamentally wrong with you or that you will always feel this way.

So what can help?

There isn’t a single answer, and sometimes what helps isn’t another push to socialise but somebody being curious about why socialising has become so difficult. Perhaps school is taking so much energy that there genuinely isn’t much left at the weekend. Perhaps a particular friendship has become difficult, anxiety has started to develop around situations that were already challenging, or the environments available to them simply aren’t places where they feel particularly comfortable.

It can also be worth thinking differently about what connection has to look like. A friendship built around gaming is still a friendship. Sitting alongside somebody doing a shared activity can be connection. One close friend may be far more valuable than a large friendship group, and an online community based around a shared interest may provide a sense of belonging that isn’t available at school.

Sometimes practical support with anxiety, friendships or communication can help. Sometimes changes at school can reduce the amount of overwhelm a young person is carrying. Therapy can also be useful where a teenager is struggling with anxiety, self-esteem, relationships or the impact of previous experiences, but not everything needs to become a therapeutic problem.

Sometimes a teenager needs space to recover, sometimes they need help finding people with whom they have something in common, and sometimes they need the adults around them to understand that what looks like withdrawal from the outside may have a much more complicated story behind it.

The aim isn’t to make a neurodivergent teenager look less neurodivergent. It is to help them understand themselves, recognise what they need and gradually find relationships and places where being themselves doesn’t require quite so much work.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in being surrounded by people while feeling that nobody really knows you, and the teenage years can be hard enough without feeling that you have to pretend to be somebody else to belong.