As with everything in life, you have to go through trial and error to learn it, whatever it may be.
Same with social skills unfortunately. I guess the more unfortunate part of learning how to socialize is that there’s judgement and shame, a lot of which came from ourselves. And this hits harder than other things that we have to learn by trial and error I feel like.
This trial and error method may seem obvious for most but to me I guess it always seemed like its a skill people either have or dont have. It feels like its a binary behavior and feels like a mountain to climb with no intermediate step between. In my case I do not have this skill and for people like us, we just try to “obtain” this skill or just think that there’s something wrong with us. And a lot of the advice has been “just get used to it”, “get more exposure to it” and “practice”. All of which are absolutely true. I think the part that isnt as spoken about is that we will absolutely fail many times over before we get good at this. We will absolute go through the shame of saying something wrong or reading the “air” wrong, people get the wrong idea about us and we will agonize over it for days if not weeks. I think part of this is that you have to trust that the person ur talking to (and all people in general) won’t judge you which they most likely wont (kinda depends on age) and that they will try to understand you. I think if we have that trust in people then we arent as afraid to try and try. I know the world isnt ideal and we will get hurt and that’s just another layer to this trial and error world, whether we find the right people to go through this learning curve with.
I guess what I am trying to say is, we will get discouraged along way, expect it but dont give up. This will hopefully set a better expectation of this steep learning curve.