Confused with myself

I feel empty, down, and dissatisfied with life. I think this is because I feel lonely. I have one best friend at home whom I call hang out with every few weeks when I go back. At college, I have a friend, but we don’t really hang out that much outside of study stuff. I have a handful of other acquaintances at college who I hang out with maybe once or twice per term. But I still feel very lonely. Here’s the thing though: I was completely happy staying in my room keeping my own company for all of high school and middle school. I didn’t even question my social life and I was perfectly happy. But a month into first year of college and I suddenly felt lonely for the first time. The idea of having a fair few friends and socialising a lot seems really fun, and seeing others socialising makes me sad. I cycle through wanting to be a complete hermit in the woods forever to living in a big city with lots of friends and socialising.

My social skills are absolutely terrible. I feel like it goes okay for the first few minutes of meeting someone, maybe even half an hour if we ‘click’, but then I run out of things to talk about. My mind goes completely blank and I have to really put in a lot of effort to think of stuff to say (this is really bad and must be fixed!!! it even it happens with my college friend and best friend a lot). So it ends up taking way too long for me to say something or respond and it just completely kills any flow. I have always felt awkward and unnatural when socialising. It feels like I have to force myself a lot to give enough energy (even with my college friend sometimes). I have a naturally quiet and harmonically rich but not warm and round voice. My fundamental is low but quieter than the first few overtones and it kind of sounds like an annoying, scratchy, filtered saw when I talk. In higher registers where I have to force my voice, my fundamental becomes loudest. Also my accent is kind of lazy and mumbled and when I try to speak clearly, it sounds very strange to me in recordings. Because of my naturally quiet and unintelligible voice, I often get told to speak up, but I lose my voice extremely super quickly when I do.

I wonder if my crap social skills come from autism as some people have had this slight impression of me. I also wonder if I’m just genuinely not interested in people and that’s why I can’t engage with people cause I have no desire to. Maybe if this true, it comes from possible depression (I’ve felt quite down the past year and I slowly stopped doing my hobbies idk if this means anything). Or maybe from potential narcissism. Maybe my desire to socialise just comes from FOMO? That could explain why I was a happy loner in high school, but a lonely loner in college where there’s a lot more freedom and ‘canon main character events’ and stuff. Or maybe it’s just because school forces you to be around people 8 hours a day so that was enough socialising for me.

I keep getting into a cycle of wanting to socialise and then asking myself if socialising and loneliness is really the problem and then not doing anything. But I do feel empty and sad and I’m sure it’s because I’m lonely.

So how do I socialise more and be more interested and engaged and derive more enjoyment from socialising?