Awkwardness and embarrassment

Awkwardness and embarrassment may look alike, but in fact are utterly different things. Awkwardness is tight, sour, unpleasant and in intense-enough doses can make one extremely self-conscious. But embarrassment, if strong enough, occludes the whole world, shrinks the cosmos to the hot, tight, agonized cranium of the embarrassed person. You are not self-conscious in the same way an awkward person is, because embarrassment makes the self itself molten. It is much worse.