Join something before you feel like joining something

The feeling of wanting to go arrives after you have gone a few times, not before.

Almost everyone waits to feel ready. They wait to feel less tired, less new, less conspicuous, and then they will join the club, the team, the choir, the volunteer thing. The wait does not end, because the feeling being waited for is produced by the activity itself. Belonging is a lagging indicator. You go while feeling like an outsider, several times, and somewhere around the fourth visit you notice you are not scanning the room any more. There is no shortcut through that and no version where the confidence arrives first and the attendance follows.

Choose on structure rather than on passion. The best thing to join when you are new is not the one you care about most, it is the one that meets weekly, at a fixed time, with the same people, and involves doing something rather than mingling. Regularity does the work: it manufactures repeated exposure to the same faces, which is the actual mechanism by which strangers become familiar. A sport, a rehearsal, a workshop, a shift on a stall, a class in something unrelated to your course. Anything with a calendar entry beats anything that depends on you feeling social on the night.

Give it a fixed trial: four attendances, decided in advance, before you allow yourself an opinion. This protects you from the first visit, which is always the worst one and always unrepresentative, and from the polite drift where you mean to go back and then a month passes. If after four it is genuinely not for you, leave without guilt and use the slot on something else. If you have moved for study, this is doubly worth doing, because a weekly commitment is the fastest way to build the kind of ordinary routine that makes a new place stop feeling like a trip.