I'm a neurodivergent, asocial person. Always have been. Though i still have had a few friends during my life. I managed to get by for a while with just the 2-3 people I talk to, but recently I've started to get really lonely. The way i've made friends in the past has been someone approaching me, not the other way around though. I don't know how to make friends/acquaintances with other people on my own. Me growing up with the internet probably played a role in my lack of real life social skills, i'm guessing
I was going to dump a whole bunch of superfluous information for some reason, but the useful thing I had to say was this:
You won't meet people by being alone. Go somewhere with people, preferably many, and find the most extroverted person you can. That kind of person is usually willing to do a lot of the conversational work for you if you can mention even a token topic, and furthermore extroverted people tend to have a lot of friends, so you can benefit from having a bunch of people be easier to talk to because you've got the extrovert fellow vouching for you and perhaps also participating in the conversation.
As a more literal response to your question, it can be easier to hold a conversation in a group. Yeah, for people like me and possibly you, the prospect of being in a group is kind of intimidating, but the great thing about groups is you can be silent for much longer stretches of time without it being any problem, and then re-enter active conversation at a point in it where you feel most comfortable.
The problem is that I often have a lot of things to say but just can't get a word in!
I consider it a victory in a case like this (or like mine) if one gets to the point that they have some relatively formulated utterance that they are desperate for an opening to share. It's much better than not talking because you have nothing you're sure how to say.
Eh, it’s a dialectic. I am perpetually coming up with things to say and I rarely find the opportunity to say any of it. I just need to work on greetings or something ig.
Yeah, that's true, but it's still frustrating, right? Though the easy solution is to just note down everything you want to say, and ask if you can get to your points on the topics that the rest of the group has already moved past. Doing this is maybe less "smooth", but people are generally not so rude and unreasonable as to say "you only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow, the opportunity (to share your opinion on a specific topic) comes once in a lifetime, yo"
That's fair, yeah