Are any other newbies here absolutely petrified of playing against real people?

Actual people are more fun to play against, they make mistakes and can lose on time and suffer in hard positions.

I am noobiest person on Chess.com

Can chat be turned off mid-game, if the opponent is getting annoying or trash talking?

Yes, and there is no reason to think you need to play "blitz" against other people. Play a 3-day move game. Take your time. Think before you move. Everybody is in such a hurry. Enjoy "the other beautiful game." Study the games of great players from the past and let chess teach itself to you. 

I posted something similar last year, and I can honestly say that it's best to just jump in and play.  You'll get more comfortable as the games go on.  The thing that really helped with me is the fact that your intelligence is NOT directly related to your play.  Chess is a cerebral game, for sure, but it is not a good indicator of your intelligence level.  Just jump in and play some games, you'll get very comfortable very quickly.

So true.

This is very true, a few days before this post I posted something similar. I posted that I find it "nerve-wracking" to play humans compared to bots. Maybe this is one of the reasons, because chess is a "brain game" it is more intimidating to face an opponent. 

At my level it is easy to not spot something and simply give a piece away, it is easy to feel like an idiot then.  One thing that helps is to analyse games by much better players, the majority makes bad moves at times. I guess it is simply human nature. 

Well, I think puzzles and playing more games help with this. Because it is important to learn visulization and this is what I have learned by doing tactics. You are looking at whole board looking for weakness to be attack. So yeah, analyse and doing puzzle is the key I think. This helped me to get to 1000 easily

I've been doing lots of puzzles, here and from books too. From what I'm learning it is about spotting patterns, a few days back I didn't know what to back rank or smothered checkmate was. But now those are things I'm starting to look for. 

For me, it is very hard to visualize chess! I literally picture the piece with red squares around it where it can attack. But it is a fun challenge that I hope I will get better at some time.  

Of course you will and you definitely can. I mean when I was 1200 I knew only basic tactics. Now at 1350 (still learning and exciting to see what I am going to figure out about chess) I see that chess is about position and understanding pawn structure. I think chess is still about tactics but when your rating increase, there are more things that have to be considered. So if you wanna be 1200 just train tactics. Play longer games to think. You can learn skewer, pin and double attack - another good things to know, and yes. It is about spotting patterns but maybe you can try to do harder puzzles to learn to calculate more into deep. This can be useful as well

Same

The site has people pretending to be pretty much any animal you can think of.  You might be able to find a bread box, tether pole, tooth brush, flat tire, opened can of peas to play if you look hard enough.

I think we are overthinking this a lot.  Perhaps this irrational fear of playing a real player is an unfortunate by-product of participation trophies and anonymous social media (like this place) , a place where someone you don't know might think ill of you for.....losing a game, or perhaps you feel inadequate for....losing a game.  We all start at the bottom, and there are second placers that lost to Fisher, Magnus, et. al, and none of them are inadequate. So please, just hit the play button, get your heart rate up and go for it!

If you ignore the profile pic, avatar, and chat you are basically playing a bot. Just hit play! I lose far more than I win, unfortunately, but I keep playing and doing puzzles. I try to learn from each game and remember when I was in similar positions on the board.

Good luck.

If not for covid, my advice would be: play over the board, including official tournament rated games, as soon and as much as possible.

I honestly shiver at the sight of playing against someone online. It's terrifying.

Great post!

Being a beginner is hard, and it's okay to have feelings. Don't let macho-types trivialize them, but also don't let feelings high jack your mind and make it paralyzed. As other posts say, the anxiety will go away after a while. Try and focus on the puzzles, and not so much the outcome. I played a few puzzles yesterday, and a few checkmate puzzles the day before. Oh wow, I was awful. I'll be playing my first game (in a while) on the weekend though. I'm a bit nervous too—but we've got this!