You'll get a lot of rejections, weird looks and so on but that is largely going to be because you're so panicked and uncomfortable: it's not that you're not worthy of being viewed as something more than a sexless friend, you'll just be weird about it at first. But sooner or later you'll get a few positive results: women will respond well, and you'll have positive reference experiences for the future, and that will give you more confidence.

the positive reference point thing probably works for some but personally speaking, after a fair few failures, I just ended up more withdrawn, lowered my self-esteem and made it harder for me to approach even just for a friendly chat. I'm a virgin who's literally gotten worse after a year of trying (ok maybe I tried as much in the last few months as I did in my first month but I tried a looot at first.)

I started off okay, when I first tried this whole thing after moving from a conservative country back to my liberal homeland middle of last year. I approached a lot but often I ended up doing mostly nothing sexual. So I tried escalation more specifically but it felt very unnatural to me and the weirdness of it made my social anxiety come back very intensely during those moments. Repeatedly failing at escalation or making it weird didn't help me as it made me progressively worse when I ended up in those situations where I had to escalate and I just got stuck on a downwards spiral for months on end to the point I felt my social anxiety had come back pretty strongly in regards to trying to pickup women.

But seriously nowadays I feel good if I've approached one or two girls and had a friendly conversation in one night whereas I could do that with no problems this time last year or even 6months ago and thats still an improvement over my lowest points which were the last two months where I was basically the most useless I've ever been. Its pathetic and I know it but I pretty much fell face-first last time I forced myself to try again and again and I'm afraid of doing it again and ending up even worse off than this time.

I have no idea what to do about this. And its kind of ironic because I compensated for my continual social failings by dressing better and other cosmetic improvements (as well as getting a bit better at dancing) so I'm in a much better position logically speaking than last year; that was my basis for not giving up completely.