honestly as someone who took many years to get over some truly disabling social anxiety, I think one of the best things for it is to lower the stakes in ur mind. like, I remember in my mind the idea of "social interaction going imperfectly" or "getting embarrassed" or "other person thinking you're weird or kinda rude" was just life-endingly horrific. it was unfathomably scary. but like. real life is not the middle school cafeteria! in real life, people treating you like middle school bullies is actually weird of THEM and socially inappropriate of THEM. if people try to pull some mean girls shit on you as an adult it's like wow. that's an incredibly cringe way to behave as an adult human being. yikes. anyway!
and like the reality is that if you fumble a conversation or accidentally say something that the other person takes issue with or do something embarrassing, it actually is not a high stakes situation. it's simply not. it's one of the lowest stakes types of social interactions it is possible to have. and I think probably why it took me a long time to get used to, and why it often takes other people (especially neurodivergent queer ppl!) a long time to get used to, is that you need to build up a number of interactions in your memory database in which either you or someone else fuck up in a minor embarrassing way and NOTHING BAD HAPPENS. that's the fastest and best way to get over this. which is scary! but! crucially ITS NOT AS SCARY AS REMAINING ISOLATED FOREVER AND BEING TERRIFIED OF OTHER HUMAN BEINGS.
the thing I did that helped me with this as a young autistic person was that I gameified interactions in my head. by which I mean I would literally practice having low stakes pleasant Chats with strangers like, at shops I went to etc, and every time the other person was clearly pleased to be having the chat with me or they laughed at something I said or it was just a pleasant interaction, I would play a little Mario Party Coin Get! noise in my head for myself. this worked INCREDIBLY well and I was able to develop pretty strong small talk skills pretty quickly after implementing it. obviously I still fuck up like... regularly and obviously I still remember and often dwell on the negative interactions because at the end of the day I am very neurotic about socializing. but I have also made myself into someone who is largely pleasant for strangers to talk to. and there's a small number of really simple guidelines I follow to do that, like truly really simple things like "asking people low stakes questions about themselves" and "showing interest in what people say" and so on. I have had people who met me at age 23 meet me again a few years later and be like "who the fuck ARE you you straight up DIDN'T SPEAK TO ME before" and I had to be like "yeah sorry. I hadn't developed those skills yet" lol. which was itself an awkward conversation, but also? I was fine. nobody died.
I really like to learn things, so reframing interacting with strangers as Learning Things really helped me also. every person is a rich mine of information and you can discover many interesting things by talking to them! <- extremely autism statement but w/e. you have to customize your approach to how your own brain works and not pressure yourself to do things the way you perceive other people as doing them.
and also! MANY people have struggled with this stuff. people who you see as social butterflies who are really skilled at having conversations with strangers very likely built those skills up over time. it's quite unusual for people to just be good at this stuff right out of the gate. you're not a different species of person than people with good social skills. you're the same species of person who has had much less experience and practice.
a lot changed for me when i realized that in nearly every case people prefer someone who is weird and upbeat and outgoing over someone who is weird and miserable and scared of them. the only people that hate unapologetic weirdos are assholes who you shouldn't try to please anyway.
