If you're struggling: please don't give up!

[Loggos]

Thank you OP, I really relate!

I actually started in 1.0 but I was really, really bad for the longest of time. FF14 was also my first proper game after years of not playing.

I was so afraid to mess up that I was unable to queue into dungeons without my friend. At some point that friend wasn't able to play for a prolonged period of time so I was in the middle of a conflict between "I really want to play" and "but I can't because xyz isn't here".

In the end my will to play won and I started queueing on my own. In the beginning I had so much anxiety (sweaty hands, pounding heart and all) and would never go into a dungeon without watching a guide, but over time I got used to it, despite still being bad.
So to become better I started to look up strategies and job guides which helped me to actually engage with and understand the game's fight philosophy. It also gave me the courage to go into new dungeons without watching guides and accept if I mess up. Turns out, the world keeps turning.
By the end of EW I finally dared to go into my first EX trial, but I took more than 5 pages of notes while watching guides on repeat.

Fast forward to DT and now running every dungeon and trial blind is my explicit highlight out of all the content and I have cleared both EX trials (after watching guides 1-2 times and without taking 5 pages of notes).

(I too have some issues affecting my cognitive speed such as sensory processing and attention problems. They make it really, really hard to process visual information and thus read visual tells fast enough sometimes. Not because I don't understand how the mechanic works in theory but because the signal from my eye to my brain that tells me, what is even going on, has the speed of a snail. As a result, it takes me longer to learn fights because I need more attempts to even decipher what is visually going on during certain mechanics before it is engraved into my memory. Only then I can finally automatically recognise and respond to the shapes of mech indicators.)