I started by reading “How to Gain Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. It’s a bit dated but was required for a college course. It helped me realize there were certain actions/routines that would give me consistently okay results with most NTs. Not great, just okay, but okay was a huge improvement.
That helped alleviate the often crippling anxiety I felt in many social situations with new people. Free to actually think when around NTs who weren’t charmed by my ND data dumps, perplexing eye contact, and random obsessions, I was able to actively observe social interactions between myself and others. From there, it was a matter of trying different things and learning to lick my wounds when I blew it. My standard apology for doing something that made someone uncomfortable was along the lines of "I’m so sorry, that came across wrong. What I was trying to convey is (X). I’m not the best communicator sometimes, but I’m working on it. Can we start over? " with direct eye contact and a strong, chagrined, “practiced in the mirror” smile.
That’s the jist of it. Getting over the basic skills and confidence hump is the hardest. Once you have those, it’s really no different that practicing a sport or playing a game. It’s learning to act but for the purpose of being genuine with those who might not understand your natural inclinations.
I literally just posted about this earlier today. I used to frequent the Something Awful forums. I know, I know, but I was young and at least it wasn’t 4chan.
About 14 years back, I was having big issues with my partner and wasn’t sure what to do, so I asked the forums for relationship advice. I actually got a fair amount of well meaning advice, but also a harasser. They initially just ripped into me in response to my request, but SA was full of trolls so I ignored them. Then they responded to another new comment I made awhile later, but the forums weren’t huge. Just a coincidence, right? I continued to ignore them.
We went camping and got back a few days later. I checked my SA account and found this person had gone through my post history mocking and bullying me and had collected info to try to dox me. I was pretty carefree with what information I disclosed back then and they had a lot. They knew or at least accurately inferred: the name of the small town I lived in, the areas of town we had lived in, the year/make/model of the unusual car my now-ex drove, which university I attended and my major, where I worked and more. This all freaked me out so I reported them.
The mods’ response to my reporting a user for harassing and doxxing me was, and I quote, “LOL faggot”. Such fond memories. I quit using SA immediately and worried for weeks that something awful would happen. Pun intended. Luckily nothing did. I have scarcely thought about SA since until someone brought it up here a few hours back.