common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day
recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."
in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, calmly evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"
important additions!!!!
Sometimes learning "wow, that person is a DICK" is the best thing for your social anxiety.
Yeah the “no one else is judging you” is a hard sell when (1) some people have explicitly told me how and why they’re judging me, even long after the event, and (2) I’ve done it myself, picked up from the behavior of people around me.
It’s existentially harder to accept that people just get to have their opinions, but it’s a more solid premise. It also helps me be less attached to my own opinions, which has a neat added effect with helping me chill the fuck out about small mistakes, both my own and others’.
Also when someone is behaving like an ass, I try not to feed into it—they might be having a bad day but I don’t have to ride their emotional rollercoaster with them.
