The following advice would probably work for less than 1% of people on this platform, this may not be effective at all but it worked for me, so it may or may not be worth a try.

I have what some would call a laundry-list of mental "disabilities", but depression ain't one of them, and this is probably why:

To start let's just say that I have zero friends in high school. I have a few people that I am slightly friendly with, but the only person I can really talk to is my brother. I go to school and get mildly ridiculed daily for my lack of any social life and quietness. This has happened for at least five years, and likely will continue to happen for the rest of my high school career, if not through college as well. This seems really frickin depressing right? Well that is what I thought as well. I ended up in a place where I wasn't super depressed, but definitely not not depressed. That went on for a few years. Then I really started trying to focus on me, just ignore everyone else. As far as I was concerned, I was the best in the world and everyone else was less-than. This really helped because I ended up realizing that I was only depressed because I thought I should be depressed. And I wanted attention because I had no friends (we're past that point now). Obviously, a neurotypical person would likely be depressed, but I can take advantage of my weird brain and they can't. Honestly how I feel now is great, every time someone thinks of me as less-than, I just generally act like they are the most unintelligent piece of pond scum (they usually are), and I just know for a fact I am better than them because I don't insult random people without reason. Just because society asks me to be depressed doesn't mean I have to listen.

Now I know this doesn't help most depressed people, but maybe someone else is in this rather unique depression situation. I hope I didn't say anything offensive...

At least you have something gotten off on your chest.

Hey, I didn't have many friends at my Junior High School and my High School years.  In fact, I didn't have peer signature on my yearbook until my senior year.  Due to my hearing disabilities, I didn't have many friends and communicating proven difficult when maintaining friends.  Some friends come and goes.

That's called "being an introvert".

Sounds like my school life!😁, the good news is it gets better as you get older!
I had the same 2 friends throughout my school career!, and I don’t know how the US schools system works but in the UK you attend 4 schools, the first being kindergarten, (what we call ‘play school’) to get you use to being away from mum and dad, then we went up to ‘infant school’ where you do 3 years.

Next is ‘junior school’ where you do 4 years, and finally high school, (that we called comprehensive school) for 5 years, and in all that time I only had the same 2 friends!
Problem being, your expected to be a proper ‘boy’, i.e, like football and sports and do boy things 🤣🤣

This wasn’t me, throughout junior school we would spend break time building little dens and sitting around the school pond while all the “normal boys” 🤣 played football!
I even remember in morning assembly, instead of listening to the head teacher, I would sit quietly looking up in awe at the 8 foot twin fluorescent lights that were in our junior school hall! 🤣🤣

Unfortunately this male mindset doesn’t ever change!, even today men here are expected to have only 4 interests! 😴 1/ football, 2/ fast cars, 3/women and 4/ going out with the lads for a pint!

That’s not me either, I am married so I did number 3, but the rest I couldn’t give a rats ass about!, but as I said above, it gets easier as you get older because you learn to just brush it off and just stand back and laugh at the rest of the ‘sheep’ towing the social construct line! 😁😎

@AngryHorse
Yea, pretty much the same thing here in the US in terms of male interests, but instead of “football”, men are generally interested in baseball, american footbalthe occasional soccer or something else (idk, golf?). Cars and sports are definitely not my thing.
Even more so, girls aren’t my thing either (if you know what I mean… hehe …), but I am glad to know that things get better as I get older. I am looking forward to interacting with engineering-y people in college that are hopefully interested in semi similar things.

Do you guys ever do mass meet ups?, UK lighting forum members usually do 2, one at Dave’s, (Dave the lighting guy on here), who is a street lighting engineer, and usually one at Kev’s down in Cornwall, (though I have missed the last two at Kev’s), Kev is an Electrician here and both Dave and Kev have a vast collection of British lamps and street lighting equipment👍 it’s good to all meet up when you can guarantee that everyone there will have exactly the same interests as you 😎

I have heard of some around California in the past, I don’t think it is a regularly scheduled thing. I might do some meet ups in the future with other people when I move out, it sounds like it would be an interesting experience.

Yeah 🤔, I suppose with the size of the US, and most US members on LG being spread far and wide, it’s not as easy as doing them in our tiny country 😲