Fear of rejection is rough. But like all fears if you just face you realize its not so bad even at its worst. After you get shut down a few times you realize is isn’t that debilitating, nothing really changes. You thought they were cute and you didn’t get to spend time with them before and afterwards its the same. I found a short and direct line was the best way to go.

No one is always at the top of their game. Such things can happen for a variety of reasons, but it doesn’t cancel out the progress you have done up until now. The best thing to do is to not to dwell in it, and instead to try to learn from it, having hope and trying again in the future. (From my point of view.)

40 year old me, looks back to my 20ish self with complete lack of self confidence, and what I can say is, don’t worry, you’ll eventually get over it. We all fear rejection, don’t matter how old we are, but at least after some nos we get more resilient to it.

Think about it dialectically, we all start being afraid of even starting a conversation. Then we negate that part and get into the next step, which is actually talking to people and being rejected. It hurts a lot, but eventually you get over it. Then after being rejected many times and feeling miserable after every time we start receiving yes. But then we get afraid of commiting (at least I got into this phase), thinking that once people knew me they would find me boring and ridicule. Then I finally took the courage to say yes back, I endured and got over all the jealously and insecurity phase afterwards, and finally got into a long term relationship, which I’m still in today. Going through each step sucks, and every person handle each phase differently. What you can do is talk to a (good and trustworthy) friend or maybe a professional. I benefited a lot from therapy to overcome my social anxiety.