TIFU buy pulling my eyes at the asian waitress

Me and a good friend of mine often hang out in restaurants. Since we are both university students and quite busy, we usually go for dinner.

This time we also went quite late in the evening, and since I was working on my computer all day, I was feeling very tired, my eyes were sore and I had a pretty bad head ache. I was kind of zoned out the whole time, not really paying attention to anything. The waitress came and took our order, and as she was leaving, my friend turned to me with a horrified face and said “WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT??”. I just looked at him with confusion, having no idea what he was talking about. I asked him what he meant, and his response was: “the thing you did. The thing with your eyes. That’s hella racist”.

I was still confused about what he was saying, but then it finally hit me. There is this thing I do when my eyes are cramping and giving me a head ache, where I just run my fingers through my eyes and pull the corners up and away really tight and keep them pulled like that for a few seconds. It helps to relax my eyes and ease the pain. And yes, it looks exactly like the gesture people use to mock asians for their eyes. Until now I was not even really conscious of doing it.

Unfortunately for me, I happened to do this exact same thing when the waitress came to pick up our order. Then I realized the worst thing: our waitress was asian, and in my zoned out state, I stared right into her face while doing the gesture.

Needless to say, she did not come back to our table. I’m secretly praying she did not notice it but the chances are pretty low.

TL;DR: my eyes were hurting and as an attempt to massage them, I accidentally made a racist eye pull gesture at our asian waitress.