Atom said:
MisterLonely said:
In a way socializing is about caring less about the way you are perceived, you need to make mistakes and make a fool out of yourself, think about the times you've seen others doing that, did it make you think any less of them? did it make you see them as more human and relatable or did absolutely nothing change?
Anyway, my point is that you need to learn to be ok with how people perceive you, people that know you will very rarely change their opinion over one interaction, new people might .... but.. well does it matter what they think? or what anyone thinks?
I agree with all of your points...
How does one take those things to heart/learn, though? Would you say it's mostly experience? A lot of will? Or?
I would say it is experience and perseverance, it sometimes is hard exposing yourself to situation you know have a very high chance in resulting in nothing at all, and because of that in those moments you need to "experiment", you have been doing one thing for a while or maybe even forever that has not een working, so you need find what it is that you do "wrong" and why it is you do those things.
I'm not saying you should drastically change your ways, but you need to analyse the "failures" in order to learn from them, and then think about what it is you can do different, or what it is that is causing you to shut down.
Most of the time you'll find it's fear of one sort or another, fear of commitment, fear of being disliked, fear of the unknown, fear of actually having to put in effort and see where it goes, fear of making a fool out of yourself, fear of getting hurt, fear of causing hurt, basically fear of making a mistake and living to regret it.
Long story short, you learn through experience yes, but not all will be good ones, a lot won't even especially as you are still finding what works for you without being a fake you.
Just my take on it, and I by no means am doing good myself, but better now than I have been for years