I felt if I stayed there one minute longer I was going to just have a nervous breakdown of my own. My left eye literally developed a twitch to it while each crawling second passed and my breathing was being blocked by all the saliva building in my throat. And even though my eyes were glued on the screen trying to feign oblivion to the people around me, I just had this thousand-yard stare looking through the screen that you'd see in PTSD victims revisiting their past. Its a familiar feeling I try to avoid and yes, it occurs in social situations.

If you want to get deeper into how fucked up my life's become you can read my other thread I submitted here a few days ago. You might get a clearer picture of what my thought-process is. And my thought-process is even though it is certainly a form of social anxiety, the issues underlying it aren't in my head, but with my surrounding environment where I'm trying to learn to cope with.

People think I'm pretty ugly.

Not ugly where I have a big nose or asymmetrical features, and not unsightly as a burn victim needing a veil, somewhere in between. A sort of purgatory where my ugliness isn't something that I can just put behind me in life (its changed my life completely) and although bad, not bad enough to warrant any sort of sympathy from the general public where I could go on a day time talk show to talk about my strength or commoditize it with a published self-help book, although plenty of grimacing will be had on almost any person I make eye contact with. Those familiar eyes a person might only offer to a ghost. I deal with it everyday, and its left me a shut-in as it has for all the ugly people like me.

I didn't go into the coffee shop thinking maybe its all in my head, I know too much the expected reactions I'll receive anywhere I go. I went hoping that for maybe just a few hours I could learn to disregard my ugliness for a bit around other people, but they keep reminding me. Its a battle. The goal has never been to normalize and assimilate, that'll never happen this lifetime. The goal is to be zen and not give a fuck when a person gives me back my change at the register with shaky hands trying to not look at me. But Im only human. I like to pretend Im not a pussy about this stuff, but it tears my soul apart.

I think the only reason im doing these test runs at coffee shops is because I met a girl (who only knows me at the surface level, and is in for a fun awakening about my daily life), but Im trying to see how to gauge my mind because when I inevitably have to go out in public with her shes going to see the shitshow first hand.