Hello Sdaji,
Thank you for the response. Honestly, I felt like what I was doing really wasn't helping but every time I tried reaching out to others (the breeder I got him from included) for help, all I kept getting was basically to keep spending time around him and to make sure I was doing something in his enclosure every day so he can see me and get used to me. So I really do appreciate someone saying that going about it that way may not be the best thing to do. I do understand that my lizard is never going to be cuddly or like a cat or a dog, I just would like for him to feel comfortable around me because I don't want him to be constantly living in fear. Basically, I just want the little fellow to have a good quality of life, as I do with all my animals, but I can see where my trying too hard can do the opposite.
If you don't even want physical interaction with the lizard (which is good!), just have as little interaction as possible, short of sitting and watching it. If you're scared of something bigger and more powerful than you, that thing forcing interaction with you while you try to get away is just going to scare you more.
Lizards and other animals lose their fear of things which are in their environment but ignore them. They become more scared of things which seek them out. These are not naturally social animals, so think about how they perceive a human making attempts to interact with them in meaningless ways - the lizard can't see what could be in it for you other than you wanting to eat it, so it's terrifying. If the lizard perceives you as being in its environment but not taking any interest in the lizard, it will stop seeing you as a threat.
The reptile community in general has a massive misconception about this area, almost always suggesting more interaction as being beneficial, even though when it's negative, it makes things progressively worse. If the only direct interaction you have is introducing feed, the lizard will probably eventually see you as a positive part of the environment. If you never make attempts to interact and avoid anything which the lizard finds scary, it'll probably eventually just not care about you, and once you're at that stage you might be able to introduce more interaction if you want to, but back off as soon as the lizard is scared and don't repeat whatever scared it until you can see it's much more comfortable with you.
Unfortunately there are many scared pets and many frustrated owners out there due to this common bad advice. Of the thousands of snakes I've worked with, less than 1% have been regularly handled, but you can pick up and comfortably handle almost any of them if you want to, because they've never learned that humans are a threat, and they've always seen me and sometimes other humans doing things such as cleaning, feeding, watching and just walking around etc, in ways which never make the snakes feel threatened. In the vast majority of cases you don't actually need to handle them to make them good handlers; you'll inevitably have more than enough incidental handling interaction with them just from cleaning etc to keep them familiar and comfortable with handling. Ackies usually do become pretty comfortable being watched, hand fed, etc, and no effort is required on your part to make it happen as quickly as possible, just act like you don't care and the lizard will assume you don't care. Don't traumatise it by putting what it perceives as the big predator's smell in its home, etc.
Good luck!
