It all started when I went to a club meeting for the first time at university.
A year before that, though, a couple of friends and I ended up going to university together, and we would hang out occasionally. The three of us had a fight one day and we drifted apart. From today, it's been a few months since I've heard from either of them. Our conversations are always short and my messages are usually ignored for weeks after they're sent. We only see each other in passing. Right now I'm okay with it, but during that time when the fight was just over, I was pretty depressed. Spent about six months like that before deciding to find something else to fill up my time.
The week before the club meeting I attended, my university was holding this huge outdoor thing where all of the clubs would set up a table and try to grab new students as they walked around. I found a group that was dedicated to tabletop gaming (Magic: the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, Risk, and the like), and the two people manning the table were a guy that looked like Jesus and some other guy dressed in a Sailor Moon/Deadpool costume. The whole thing weirded me out, but they convinced me to grab a flier anyway. I didn't think much about it at the time and just wandered around some more before going back to my dorm.
Come the day of their first meeting of the semester, I sent a message out to my old friends to see if they wanted to do anything. To my dismay, there was no response. I moped around for a few hours and did some course work, and then I found the flier for the tabletop club buried in some papers. About ten minutes of internal debating later, I put my homework aside and walked over to the building where the club meeting was being held.
It turns out that I had walked in late - so a bunch of people were split into groups playing games already - but the club president was still walking around. He saw me and introduced himself, I made awkward small talk - the usual. He eventually invited me and a couple of other people to play this game called Channel A, and thus I introduced myself to some new people. It took me a while, but I eventually stopped being anxious and enjoyed the game. Afterwards, though, I felt so odd that I excused myself before playing any other games and just noped out of there.
I only recognized what that feeling was after I woke up the next morning; it was a sense of happiness. It sounds really cheezy, but I'd been so deprived of human contact and enjoyment following the fight with my old friends that the feeling of joy hit me so hard it dazed me. I began to expect that the people I interacted with were only pretending to enjoy my company, and I was so anxious that I skipped the club's next meeting. By next week, though, I was determined to try and hold onto that feeling of happiness and I went back.
As they say, from there on, it's history. Going to that club ended up with me making a lot of dear friends. It's great to see how far I've come from being so depressed two years prior, and I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had over those years for anything.