crippling awkwardness

I usually only speak when spoken to, unless there's something I need from someone or it's some sort of service interaction.
It's gotten really bad at work since people just stopped talking to me at all and think I'm being arrogant.

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Why not quite the same as I'm a weak looking lanklet I was in a similar predicament.
Do you know for a fact people at work think you're arrogant? Irrelevant either way, just curious.

You're going to need to stop preparing yourself for conversations, spooky but necessary. You're also going to need to make yourself participate in conversations every chance you get. The end goal is hopefully you'll be able to handle the stress that you face and in turn make you less stressed. Depending on your will, confidence or balls you'll have to start either small or go all out to begin with, I recommend small as going big if you're not prepared can do more harm than good.
Make conversations with the checkout chick, even just say "hi" and then when you're comfortable say "how are you". Do this multiple times a day so buy cheap stuff like fruit at different stores or something similar. Expose yourself continuously until the stress is tolerable in the sense that you can do it with little to no hesitation. Make sure to take note of how the other person reacts to you, and evaluate after each situation how they might have felt. Keep doing things like this and make them more and more challenging. Some examples I can think of some challenging things; making convo with people in elevators, cab drivers, people at bars.
Another good thing to do is to expose yourself to your feared outcome. What I gathered from your post is that you don't want people to think you're creepy, or arrogant. Correct me if I'm wrong.
What you want to do is something that will make you come across as those things, this will expose you to the feared outcome and eventually you'll learn to tolerate it and not see it as much of an issue, eventually making it less scary.

>>18473743
>cont
tldr exposure therapy

Some say it doesn't work but I believe it's because they aren't committed. It's like getting fit, you have to put a lot of effort in and sometimes spend long amounts of time to see considerable improvements. I used this method to get over my social anxiety, 1 year ago I feared leaving my house, now I go out multiple times a week. I'm not psychologist or professional so I may have explained it poorly so please ask any questions. The book I posted originally is a good read and has some good scenarios to place yourself in. Just remember this isn't an overnight thing, and it's hard but it does work.