You Get to Keep Part of the Story

A few days ago, after work, I ran home, got sweaty, got tired, got peaceful, and then took my dog for a walk through Wellons Village.

This was not an expedition.

I was not seeking danger, revelation, personal growth, or anything else that could later be packaged into a lesson. I had Solveig on the leash and nowhere in particular to be. She was in charge of navigation, which meant we were following the ancient canine transportation system of turning toward whatever smelled most promising.

This often takes us into Wellons Village.

Wellons Village has a reputation. People get shot there. Things happen there. I know this.

It is also ten minutes from my house, and Solveig knows, with the absolute certainty of a field biologist, that people in the area drop food on the ground.

So we go there.

That afternoon I was feeling remarkably good. The run home had burned off whatever static had accumulated during the workday. I was tired in the clean way. The world seemed basically acceptable.

Then Solveig found a chicken bone.

We were standing at an intersection waiting for the light to change. At the base of the crossing pole, amid the usual urban archaeology of wrappers, grit, and things a dog should probably not eat, there it was.

A chicken bone.

I was dealing with this important development when a man I had passed a minute earlier came back toward me.

I had barely registered him the first time. He had been talking to himself, or perhaps to somebody who wasn't there, or perhaps to the universe at large. In that part of town, this did not qualify as breaking news.

He came up and said something like, "Hey, what's up?"

I said something like, "Check it out. She found a chicken bone."

This was apparently the final normal sentence of the afternoon.

He stepped toward me.

Then he took the sunglasses directly off my face.

"You're a fed," he said.

This was news to me.

He had his hands around my head while he was doing this, and somewhere in the process he knocked one of my AirPods loose. It landed on the pavement behind him.

There was no dramatic internal monologue.

No tactical calculation.

No cinematic moment in which time slowed down and I assessed the geometry of the battlefield.

I got furious.

And I started swinging.

The man was considerably bigger than me. Not athletic-big. More like somebody who had once been designed for football and had since fallen out of warranty.

I hit him.

Or tried to.

He did not seem especially troubled by this.

In fact, he seemed amused.

"He fights like a fed," he said.

Now, I do not know what federal fighting doctrine looks like, but apparently I had mastered it.

I kept trying to hit him.

At some point I managed to grab my sunglasses back out of his hand. Then I reached around him, found my AirPod on the ground, picked it up, and got moving.

Sunglasses: recovered.

AirPod: recovered.

Dog: intact.

Me: intact.

I took Solveig and got the hell down the road.

That should have been the end of the story.

My nervous system disagreed.

For the rest of the night, I was furious.

Not frightened, interestingly. Furious.

I kept replaying the encounter and editing it.

I should have kept fighting.

I should have landed something better.

I should have done something memorable enough that this guy would think twice the next time he decided to walk up to a stranger and start grabbing things off his face.

This is one of the strange things about anger. It can take an event that ended reasonably well and accuse you of failing because you did not turn it into a catastrophe.

For about a day, I bought into that logic.

Then I looked at what had actually happened.

The guy took my sunglasses.

I got them back.

He knocked out my AirPod.

I got that back too.

I defended myself.

I left.

Solveig and I went home.

What exactly was missing?

The answer was that nothing was missing except revenge.

Anything beyond the point when I had recovered my stuff and had a clean exit would no longer have been about defending myself. It would have been about satisfying the primitive little prosecutor in my head who wanted a more decisive ending.

That realization changed the memory.

Not the facts.

The meaning.

At first, the incident sat in my mind as evidence of something unpleasant and obvious: you can be walking your dog on an ordinary afternoon, feeling perfectly at peace with the world, and some lunatic can suddenly decide that you are a federal agent and remove your sunglasses.

Fair enough.

The world contains instability.

This was not a revelation.

But the encounter also gave me another piece of information.

I had wondered before what I would do if somebody physically confronted me.

Would I freeze?

Would I panic?

Would my brain simply depart the premises?

Apparently not.

At least this time, fear never really entered the equation.

I was angry, active, and very much present.

Now, this does not mean that immediately punching somebody larger than you is a universally recommended method of conflict resolution.

It is not.

It might not even have been the smartest thing I could have done in that situation.

But that was not the part of the experience I ultimately valued.

The valuable part was discovering that when the situation became physical and unpredictable, I did not experience myself as helpless.

I still had agency.

And there is a peculiar kind of confidence that comes from learning something about yourself in conditions you did not choose.

You can tell yourself for years that you would be brave in a crisis.

You can imagine it.

You can rehearse it.

You can build an entire flattering theory of yourself.

Then something happens.

And now you have data.

I started thinking about the incident as part of what I have come to think of as the folklore of the self.

Everybody has some version of this.

We carry around stories about ourselves.

I am somebody who does this.

I am somebody who can't do that.

I fall apart when things get difficult.

I stay calm.

I always get pushed around.

I find my way out.

Some of these stories are based on solid evidence.

Others are based on one embarrassing afternoon in 2007 that somehow acquired constitutional authority over the rest of our lives.

But they accumulate.

Eventually they become private folklore.

And when something bad happens, sometimes there is more than one story available inside the same set of facts.

I could tell myself:

A man assaulted me while I was walking my dog.

That is true.

I can also tell myself:

A man assaulted me while I was walking my dog, and I discovered that when somebody suddenly violated my physical boundaries, my instinct was not to collapse.

That is also true.

The second version does not erase the first.

It does not transform the guy into a spiritual teacher.

I owe him no gratitude.

There is a particularly irritating strain of self-help philosophy that insists every miserable experience is secretly a present from the universe.

No.

Sometimes somebody just takes your sunglasses.

Sometimes terrible things happen and there is no hidden dividend inside them at all.

Some experiences damage people badly and permanently. There is no obligation to emerge from suffering wiser, stronger, more interesting, or grateful for the privilege.

But sometimes a bad experience contains evidence about you that is worth preserving.

Maybe you endured something you thought would break you.

Maybe you stayed kind in circumstances that gave you every excuse not to.

Maybe you improvised.

Maybe you protected somebody.

Maybe you walked away when anger wanted you to stay.

Maybe you simply discovered that when the machinery started shaking, you remained at the controls.

If that evidence is there, I think you are allowed to keep it.

That is different from pretending the bad thing was good.

You are not redeeming the event.

You are taking possession of your portion of it.

The person who hurts you may occupy thirty seconds of your life and then disappear forever.

Your memory can give them decades.

That seems like an extraordinarily generous arrangement.

So perhaps one way to reduce their ownership is to change who the story is about.

Not:

This is the story of what that person did to me.

But:

This is the story of what I learned about myself when that person showed up.

You do not get to choose everything that happens to you.

You do get some say in what becomes folklore.

You get to keep part of the story.

And after all of this, Solveig and I kept walking.

She had already forgotten the man, the sunglasses, the federal accusation, and probably me.

There were smells ahead.

And somewhere out there, no doubt, another chicken bone.