Facing anxiety when meeting new people
It is a hard thing to work on for people with anxiety, but it is worthwhile and it pays off: trying to stop assuming people are judging you. It is something I’ve struggled with for most of my life. Most people are not judging you in the harshest way possible, even if someone did so in the past, and it’s tempting to apply this feeling of being judged by one person in the past to any person you meet in the present. Everyone is different, and most people are more concerned with their own problems and similarly to you, they also worry about how you will perceive them. People are most likely to remember their own embarrassing experiences instead of the ones that happened to others.
Yes, maybe someone was overly critical of you in the past, but it’s not fair to you and it’s not fair to others when you assume a person is always judging you and thinking you’re not good enough. Not everyone interacting with you does so in bad faith, sometimes they just want to get to know you, to have a conversation. Sometimes people don’t connect well to each other because they don’t have much in common, but that doesn’t mean you annoyed them to the point of them being disinterested. You’re not an embarrassment, you’re worthy of friendship and love and connection, that’s the part of you that makes you human, a social animal.
We thrive in communities, so please don’t isolate yourself from others by thinking you’re never good enough and that people will never find you interesting enough to talk to. Sometimes you have to make that first step and talk to them first. That being said, if you still feel paralyzed by anxiety and by what might happen if someone doesn’t like you, remember that even if someone did voice their criticism so harshly that it caused an impact on your self-esteem and made you feel humiliated and miserable in the past, they are not the rule, they are the exception, and not everyone will feel the same way about you, and their treatment of you doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you, but their actions were wrong. Nothing excuses treating people like that, and I’m sorry that happened to you.
There are still so many people in the world who might like you. Keep in mind that don’t have to do everything to get the approval from someone who demands perfection from a fallible human being (as all of us are), that their judgement doesn’t equate with your real worth, and that you shouldn’t strive to earn respect from someone who feels like their respect is something people need to work for, to earn, as if it isn’t a basic right to be treated with dignity. Most people won’t be like them. Most people are going through something of their own and they probably don’t have a problem with you.
It’s better to give people the benefit of the doubt than to assume everyone is thinking about all the ways you are inadequate and how much they hate you. Don’t assume you’ll fail at socializing before you even try, give yourself some grace by thinking that maybe things won’t go wrong. What if they work out?