I have low self esteem because I don’t have friends but I don’t have friends because I have low self esteem.

That’s basically the story of my life.

I grew up as a socially anxious kid with an intense fear of rejection and sense of inferiority. I’ve had friends over the years but I’ve always felt like I belonged to the “side friends” group never the main one, the “cool” one. I’ve come to the realization that (because of childhood traumas of being excluded) when I approach people in contexts where I can make friends (like college), my mind always anticipates rejection from peers and that makes me behave in a very awkward, boring and “filtered” way that ironically provokes actual rejection.

I’ve also noticed that this is mainly because of my low self esteem which in my case, amongst other things, is largely caused by the fact that I don’t have any (close) friends and I rarely go out. So basically when I try to meet people in college my internal thoughts are: “Why am I even bothering? These are all cool people with friends and social lives (I already know that because I know some of them on instagram), they will never give me the time of day once they’ll know what my loser life actually is”. (Let’s be honest, especially at this age (I’m 20) most of the people like you if you are a cool and popular dude with lots of friends and girls otherwise you fall into the “loser” or “nerd” category, at least in my personal experience)

Quite frankly I really don’t know how to break the cycle because even when I want to try to train my social skills and try to make friends my low self esteem and my sense of inferiority completely hamper me.

What work should I do? What steps should I take?

Thank you a lot