Your worst moment is the main event in your head and a footnote in everyone else’s.

Attention is unevenly distributed, and yours is almost entirely on you. The thing you said wrong plays on a loop from the inside, while from the outside it was a few seconds in a day crowded with other people’s own loops. Nobody is withholding judgment out of kindness. They genuinely have less room for your worst moment than you can imagine.

Test it rather than arguing with yourself. Try to recall a specific embarrassing thing somebody else did a month ago; you will usually come up blank. That blank is roughly what you look like in everybody else’s memory.