No need to self deprecate, socializing is an integral part of human life and we humans suffer greatly without adequate socialization or without the opportunity to have intimate relationships, that’s just scientific fact.

As a fellow 25 year old I will say no, it’s not too late, and there absolutely is a point to continuing your growth. You must remember that we are showered with images of 20somethings who all look like they’ve leveled up and got their shit super together and are living a dream but it’s all smoke and mirrors people use to try and sell confidence in themselves as a brand in this late stage capitalist hellscape. The few who aren’t faking it are anomalies, not the average. Many people don’t start learning who they are and getting their life together until their 30s, and while I might have A B and C together you have X Y and Z together; we all develop the different facets of our life at different rates. I mean hey, I just lost my girlfriend of 6 years and with it my opportunity for the career I wanted, my home, the backbone of my life and everything else I built on its foundation. I might not have the levels of social anxiety that you have but I also feel knocked down into the dirt and, looking around at my peers, feeling like I’m being left behind as everyone levels up faster than I can hope to catch up, I’m honestly genuinely worried I might be homeless or locked up within the next 5 years if I don’t get my shit together from scratch all over again.

But it’s really not that bleak. We humans are hardwired to adapt to our new needs and circumstances. You might feel like you’ll never be able to break the barrier and have a partner or friends but you will, and you likely will faster than you dread it will take. You will fail dozens of times in between then and now but you will continue to learn, continue to feel hopeless. But if you push through this despair you will wake up one day and realize it was all just a bullshit illusion. You will fail but you will improve…you just have to keep trying. I know that sounds cliché but it’s the realest shit I’ve ever accepted and it has delivered me from the precipice of destruction more times than I can count.

I used to have depression that kept getting worse and worse and I was SURE I was eventually going to drown, to kill myself or some other equivalent level of self-destruction. I kept going through the motions to fight it…worked on my trauma, worked on my relationships, worked on my behavior and thought patterns, made sure I exercised and ate right, made sure I did productive and enriching things in my spare time. It did nothing for me…until it finally did. It’s like my neurons in my brain just finally said “ah, okay, I see you, got it” and decided to match me. I’m not saying I live on a cloud of sunshine and rainbows everyday and obviously with my aforementioned terrible breakup I’m not exactly at my 100% but I can also say that some demons that had haunted me since my early adolescence were vanquished…or at least vanquished enough that I can function MUCH better now that I would have without trying for so long with seemingly no fruits of my labor.

That’s the thing really…just keep trying even when it seems fruitless. It’s not fruitless, it just LOOKS fruitless today, but these things tally up in the background, sometimes taking months or years or many many years before they finally culminate in something. And then you wake up one day and you’re like, “Oh shit, all that effort was actually worth something. Huh.”

If you want to practice talking to people I would be super down to talk, I’m definitely a weirdo but I like talking to all sorts of people, there’s no judgement as believe me I have been an double mega ultra cringelord most of my life trying to talk to people (I moved constantly as a kid and was a loner and never learned how to socialize properly until post high school). Lemmygrad is a pain in the ass to message back and forth on (doesn’t help I still have almost 200 unanswered notifications clogging up my shit) but I could message you here or anywhere else, whichever is preferable to you.

If not no worries either! No pressure!

You got this, you just have to keep at it.