Malvineous:
I'm going to add to an old post I made on a similar thread. I used to have terrible social anxiety, but I was able to get rid of most of it. In short, there's no big secret, it just takes a lot of practice. You'll need to have IRL conversations with people as often as possible (preferably daily), and your anxiety will slowly get less over time. Of course that means that you're going to have to push through those feelings and allow yourself to feel the fear in order to even get started. The best situation would be if you had people at work you can talk to, or if you live with family or roommates, that could also help to some extent. Here are some things that have worked for me:
- When you go shopping, you could try to make small talk with the cashier while you're being rung up. It's a short, low stakes interaction that will give you practice talking to people you don't already know.
- If you don't have friends you can easily hang out with, you can try looking for groups based on your interests that have a lot of members local to you, like board gaming groups. You can also try to make friends individually by messaging them on your social platform of choice.
- Don't hesitate to send the first message. If you understand that people enjoy having friends, then your conversation can't be an imposition. Easy conversation starters are to comment on something they posted, something in their profile, or really anything you have in common. Don't lead with something like "Hey" and wait for a response before initiating the actual conversation. A lot of people will leave you on read.
- It's better to bring up what you want from them sooner rather than later. The longer you make small talk and wait, the harder it'll become to finally cross that chasm. Plus, people generally want to know your intentions upfront anyway. Another benefit of putting your cards on the table is that it actually saves you from negative experiences. Worst case scenario is that they think you're weird and ghost you. So what? You've barely spoken to them, so they mean nothing to you. You've just saved yourself a lot of time that would be wasted trying to make awkward conversation in order to get their approval when ultimately they wouldn't have been interested anyway. There's also many other possible reasons someone might not respond to you. They may not be looking for certain kinds of connections. They could be having a bad day from work and want to be left alone. They could be asleep, and then your message gets buried in their inbox. It could have nothing to do with you at all.
- Try to tone down your filter. If you're mentally screening everything you say to make sure it's ok first, you will end up being slow to respond and stay quiet a lot. Speaking off the cuff can be hard at first, but you can actually practice when you're alone. Pick a topic and try voicing your thoughts out loud as you're thinking them, like a stream of consciousness. Once that feels natural, you can just do the same thing whenever there's an awkward silence in the conversation. It almost doesn't matter what you say. Saying something dumb or pointless can make you seem more interesting than if you just stayed quiet.
- Fake it til you make it. Pretend that the other person is already a close friend that you've been hanging out with for years. They won't know that you're roleplaying, and will usually try to match your energy. If you do become friends, those feelings will become genuine anyway, so you won't be faking it anymore. You're not trying to act like someone you're not, you're still being yourself, but just a version of yourself in a better headspace.
- Remember that being a "good listener" doesn't mean being passive in the conversation. Whenever they tell you something, you should try to relate it to your own experience or try to tell an anecdote or something. Try to avoid just asking one question after another, since that can feel like an interview. While people like talking about themselves, they like finding common ground even more.
- Eye contact used to be hard for me, but if you feel like you need to look away too much, you can just stare at their forehead instead. They can't actually tell the difference.
- Remember that none of this actually matters in the grand scheme of things. The world has almost 8 billion people scratching around in the dark, trying to make sense out of chaos, but nobody actually has it figured out any better than you do. There's no excuse for not pursuing the things that make you feel fulfilled.
Excellent post. Very well thought out and expressed. Hopefully it will inspire a lot of people on here to persevere with social interactions.
But then again there is a language barrier problem. Welp... I should've studied Spanish courses on Duolingo. 
