I managed to get myself to go out drinking tonight, and ended up going home alone like always. Sometimes I have no idea why I keep trying.

What keeps me going is realizing that I shouldn't be going to bars/clubs trying to pick up women. I'm just terribly bad at it. I come off as creepy or don't know what to say. I like indulging in the fantasy that I could possibly pull it off, but I really can't. Coming to terms with that, and just reframing my perspective when I go out helped out a lot. I don't go to bars/clubs alone, and now if I do I'm there just to hang out and have fun drinking with friends, without having to worry about meeting someone new and all the anxiety that comes with that for me.

I guess the changing point in my life is just learning to compliment people and to appreciate other people in my life. And to really just not focus on anything negative or "i wish i could do ...." attitudes. I had a very superficial and vain attitude, something probably learned from watching too much tv and movies and not enough real life social interaction. I thought life was supposed to be simple: try to look your best, do well in school/work, show everyone how awesome you are and everything will fall into place. That's what the movies always led me to believe.

In real life I would question 'Why does this other clearly inferior person than me have so many more friends and happiness than me.' I had to reframe my perspective to understand that superficial things doesn't get friends. It's not a video game where I complete certain objectives to earn things. People and relationships aren't things that are automatically granted. And truthfully I wouldn't want to hang out with someone like my past-self who clearly thinks they are better than other people or deserve certain things in life for really no good reason.

So this was a start for me to keep going in life. I still suffer through anxiety, but over the years have become more complacent to my own isolation and social awkwardness. ie. I'm less likely to stress and have major anxiety over it, wishing why I didn't have more "awesome friends". Which is a silly way of looking at it, I was expecting my friends to be awesome and some how cater to me..all the while me not being the awesome friend to them. And then I got into a phase where I thought by being awesome to them that they should be awesome to me. And so I expected by being nice to them they should be even nicer to me or whatever. But what I was really doing was trying to somehow "buy" their appreciation, though not necessarily with money or gifts.

Now I'm at the point, where I'm just nice to be nice without expecting anything in return. It gave me a huge sense of relief of trying to earn friendships, and in the end got me more friends. Friends in the sense that if I ask them to hang out, they'll be happy to if they're free. Of course, friends who I can confide in about any personal stuff is really just only one person.

I could go on and on about this, but this is the process I've been going through for the past ten years or so.