Eating lunch alone your first week at a new school isn’t a preview of the whole year. It’s just the first week.

Week one is not a sample of the year. Nothing has settled yet, the groups that look permanent were assembled last September, and almost everyone around you is also working out where to sit. An empty table at that stage is a fact about the calendar rather than a fact about you.

Give it until something has had a chance to form, and in the meantime aim small. One person, one question, one shared thing. If it stays hard past a few weeks, that is worth telling somebody about rather than carrying alone.