Our Worst Days Become Our Best Stories

A couple months back, within the span of a few weeks, two bad things happened to me: I rode my bike into a nearly invisible, taut, kite string that lay across my path, lacerating both of my forearms. Not long after, I was awakened in the middle of the night by a nefarious knucklehead trying to steal things from my patio who I chased off by wielding a baseball bat.I had just read Charan Ranganath's book Why We Remember, and it inspired me to be as conscious as possible about how I stored those traumatic memories. And specifically, I tried to store them as stories that made me feel good about myself, while also entertaining others.Comedian Jimmy Carr asserts that our worst days become our best stories. My goal was to be aware of how these stories lived within me.I live in a very tight-knit neighborhood, and both stories have spread amongst my neighbors, told second and third hand at this point, circling back to me in fascinating and inaccurate ways. The way I tell my kite string story,…