The poorly socialized unsocial misanthropic introvert and "social skills"

I hate being in social situations and they make me anxious for various reasons which are not the same as the reasons of people with Social Anxiety type disorders. I've kind of always hated social situations. For the last couple of years I've been trying to force myself to practice them.

And the thing is, I have definitely gotten better. I've gotten more able to cope with them, with less anxiety before and during, and less exhaustion after, and I've also gotten more practiced at it, which makes the social interactions themselves more easy, although not more desired.

So like... I think my social skills have improved?

The thing is, it doesn't feel like my social skills have improved; it just feels like I'm getting better at faking it. What I'm faking is not actually skill, though: I'm faking being social, e.g. interest in other people, feelings other than extreme dislike for group activities and parties, etc.

So even though I've been completely aware of that struggle and the above increasing easiness the whole time, it literally never occurred to me until therapy today that what's improving are my actual social skills. I'm so completely accustomed to thinking of myself as a person without social skills (and being obnoxiously and contrarianly proud of same perhaps?) that I just thought of myself as getting better at pretending to be a person with social skills.

(Usually I do this by asking myself things like "What would bexless do?", "What would Sara Munro do?", "What would Miss Manners recommend?", and "What would the charismatic pagan minister of my Unitarian Universalist congregation from when I was a kid say?") (I also ridiculously often ask myself "What pose/facial expression would Natasha Romanoff adopt?")

Mind: blown.

I'm going to continue to refer to myself as a person without social skills, however. It's not like they're actually GOOD ones.