Summer Has Already Killed my Social Skills

It's only about a month into summer, in fact most students who aren't in college are still in school as of writing, and I already feel that my social skills have been fried.

As someone with autism, talking to people, especially in private situations like direct messages has always been hard. And don't even get me started on phone calls. However, I started to become more confident. I was hopping in Discord voice calls, which is something I never do.

But ever since summer started, I feel I've not only lost that ability, but it's gotten worse than before it started. Now I can't even get the confidence to even read direct messages, yet alone respond to them. And I feel bad because I don't want to leave people "on delivered," but that's what ends up happening^[1]. And if it's becoming this bad at the start of summer, I can't even imagine how bad it will become later down the line.

I've been told that I appear as "depressed and ambitionless," and to be honest I can see why someone might think that. I didn't start really showing interests until the start of May of this year, when I remembered that Splatoon exists, and now that's basically my only personality trait^[2]. But even when playing that, I'm noticing I've been becoming more shy. I'm no longer on the frontlines, I'm in the back doing side tasks. Not saying that doesn't help the team, but in this emotional observational I just thought it was worth noting.

The thing is that I want to change, but I just can't figure out how. I've always found it hard to talk with people I don't know on a personal level, but now everyone is someone I don't know on a personal level. I'm just hoping things will get better, or that college can start again quicker.