Social Anxiety

What was it like to work in a shop — not only: in the same populous, poor and gossipy neighborhood where I lived — with a social phobia? It is like for an arachnophobic to descend into a pit teeming with spiders.
Here is what I can tell you about social phobia, what I was suffering in those days. Since then, I have learned to live with it and now it is less hard, I have even made some presentations of my books with increasing success. (But this is another story and we will talk about it later).

So…

Either I die here, now and forever or I still have to live and move on.
The only possibility is to come out. Who brings to light their homosexuality, who anorexia, who bulimia, who drugs. I am a social phobic.
Those who do not know this disease, those who do not experience it on their skin, do not know how much they suffer. There is no talk of it around, only I know how much I suffer.
What for others are normal gestures of daily life, unconscious, mechanical gestures, for me are superhuman obstacles: signing under the eyes of others while my hand is shaking, working if someone observes me, calling, talking to two people together, telling a stupid joke, greeting a friend on the street, chatting with someone who comes to visit me at my workplace, passing through a crowd of people on the sidewalk, turns into an unspeakable torment.
I enter into a spiral of anxiety, a neurovegetative earthquake sets off, I sweat cold, I tremble, my face fills with blotches, my jaws dry up, my vision dazzles, I get a headache, I can no longer articulate my…