The reason I visit this sub often (beyond the fact that I'm unsuccessfull in this field, of course) is that communication with females is quite a challange for me. But after reading and applying your knowledge to practice, I had to realize a much bigger obstacle.

For almost the entirety of my life (started at 9; now I'm 22) I have always been different from other people. Not going into details as this is not /r/psychology; in short, all my thoughts, the way of thinking, the ideas coming to my mind, the way I perceive human reactions and facial expressions - all these fine details work differently inside my mind, that's what I feel.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not handicapped or egoist or something; I can agree in some concepts, and I could even find quite ordinary (and a lot of not ordinary) people as friends, with who I can share interest and hobbies - actually I can quite enjoy going out drinking!

But it was, and has always been a very long and slow process for me and in almost every cases, were initialized by the other side, meaning that I've never actually met people by directly establishing talk - well, with 2-3 extremely rare exceptions which I consider a kind of miracle up to this day.

TL;DR - It's not only about Approach Anxiety, but also about that I can hardly establish a talking that doesn't make me look like a retarded one (at least that's what I think and see...am I too critical to myself?) and a lot about that I can't perceive responses properly (I think during my life, I missed at least three chances of sex because of it) which may result me attempting to progress even in cases where it's completely impossible - or even worse: not to progress when gates are open.

What can you say? What's your advice or at least your view?

(Bonus: it quite feels like being trapped in a twilight zone, because I feel being too far from ordinary people while I know I'm definitely better than a true autist.)