It makes me really uncomfortable, just like if someone is standing too close or reading over your shoulder, only a billion times stronger.
If I can feel someone scrutinizing me (or it feels that way, even if they aren't), I can feel my stomach churn and I just want to go bury my head in the sand or crawl under a table (or any piece of furniture that I can fit underneath), and curl up into a ball and cry like a little girl. Sometimes I can even
know it is only irrational thoughts, but I just can't shake that horrible, self-conscious feeling.
When I am in the middle of doing something and feel someone looking at me, if I don't completely freeze up it is inevitable that I will majorly screw up the task, even if it is something I have done thousands of times and could do backwards in my sleep.
For example, last week at work I was making a tape of some weights on the calculator (not complicated, trained monkeys could do that), and my co-worker came up and stood behind me and watched with her hands on her hips. Then of course I screwed it up, and she bustled in to save the day and read the weights out to me. It was kind of humiliating and I felt really stupid. That always happens right when she happens to look over my shoulder and she'll say something like, "
What are you
doing?"
I feel like I need some blinders like you would use for a horse or for a trained bird. Maybe I'll just have to wear sunglasses all the time, but that wouldn't help much in the workplace where people can see what you are doing and all the ways you are screwing things up.
I'm glad other people know what I'm talking about. It's like in class or in other crowded places I just sit and can hardly move, because if I do move, or drop a pen on the floor and have to reach down to get it, it will call attention to me. Even if someone looked at me for one second as they saw me pick something up, or sneeze or something, I hate it, and I want to freeze and just sit there not moving at all. That is the thing that makes me nervous.
Same here! Then if I have to cough or I have to scratch an itch it becomes all I can think about, that and how ridiculous I feel because I probably wouldn't even notice something like that if it was another person.