So a couple days ago I took a stock of my personality and figured out that there's a few very fundamental things wrong with me that is preventing me from having any success with social situations (and, at some point, girls).
As of then, though, I've decided to, slowly but surely, improve myself in order to have better success making friends. It'll be a while, but I think I'll turn out radically better. I start by actually approaching people I don't know all that well and just saying "hi" and the like. Very basic, but still better than avoiding these situations outright, which is what I'd done in the past.
The HOPEFUL part of this post is twofold:
1) That I've managed to acknowledge there's a lot of things that I need to fix and am finally taking the initiative to fix them, and
2) That there will come a point where I'll be at the point I want to be with interacting with people. It might be a few months time, but I am generally very good at improving things that I work at.
There you go. If I start acting a bit differently in posts, it's probably a result of this.