Thoughts
I say in Stop Worrying at one point that "the less time you spend on work, the more important the time that you spend is." There's probably
a similar feedback loop when talking to people. The more often you talk to people, the lower-stakes it is. The problem is that it's easy for me to sit down and work for 8 hours. (Well, it wasn't, that was something I had to learn—crucially, by creating safe escapes, easy tasks. "First, I’m okay with “wasting” this time. Some of this time I spend scrolling on my phone, taking a nap, or making myself a snack.") And I hate social situations because I can't, or I feel like I can't, step away and take a nap if I'm overwhelmed (which I'm going to be when I haven't gone to a social event in 5 years).
I think the other problem is that relationships are never going to be easy. But I don't know. Stop Worrying is very different from conventional wisdom. (It's not very different from what people do, but it's very different from what people say.)
And Stop Worrying was really hard for me to implement at first, because it really felt like I was compromising on my values. In particular, "your time is not valuable" is something I never would have guessed would be important.