"But that's unfair!" you might say. I know, and I'm sorry. But the fact that you expect things to be "fair," as if this is all a game with referees who'll intervene on your behalf, only demonstrates how out of the loop you are. "But doesn't this create a death spiral in which being friendless makes it harder to make friends?" Yes. Yes, it does.

3 Social Anxiety Can Be (Somewhat) Healed By Socializing

"So what in the hell do you do?" There's only one option, as far as I know: You have to force yourself to endure bad face-to-face interactions. That's not my opinion, that's science. You can overcome fear of social situations by exposing yourself to them over and over. To my knowledge, that's the only way to do it without getting good and drunk every time you leave the house.

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It's also common sense. Everything from cooking to combat gets less scary the more you do it. "But what if I do something embarrassing?" Good, that's the exact thing you need to happen. A lot of social anxiety is just an extreme fear of embarrassment that rises to the level of an irrational phobia. You have to go out and endure embarrassment, and do it enough times that you stop treating it like the end of the goddamned world. Then maybe you'll stop beating yourself up over social missteps that happened years ago that nobody else cared about even then.

You have to understand that other people aren't grading your ability to avoid embarrassment. They're grading you on how well you react to embarrassing situations. But that is a learned skill, and you just have to get practice.