my worth

So, I got robbed a couple of days ago and I guess my paranoia has calmed down enough for me to write this blog.

Don't ask me the story. Please. I've repeated it too many times to count and repeating the story means reliving it. If you want to know, ask someone close to me. I'm sure they'll fill you in.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm not here to wallow about how distraught I feel or flaunt the fact that I can cross "be caught in a robbery" off my list of things to do. I'm here to state my feelings/realizations that had come from that robbery and what I had learned from it.

This may be too cliche for you, and if it is, then don't read any further.

I guess my whole "self-realization" came when I had the foot of a criminal on my back. It was only at this moment and the following moments after this that I felt weak. Now if you know me well enough, you know that I have always walked around with a dominant swagger as if I owned the world and I can make anything happen if I really wanted to. But I am not afraid to admit that in that moment, I was weak. It's important for me to emphasize this because I haven't felt that weak in a very, very long time. My ego was the last thing on my mind.This was actually a situation I had no control over and the only reason the other guys had say of what was happening was because they had a silver revolver cushioned comfortably in the palm of their hand.

Before the robbery even happened, I was eating a Nature Valley granola bar (no advertisement!) and as I took the last bite of it, my sister pulled me hard to the ground and told me that we were being robbed. I crawled into the back room as I was told and was still chewing on granola the whole time I had a gun pointed at my face. Then I realized -- "Holy shit, if I die, the last meal ever recorded in my life is a pathetic fucking granola bar." And as much as I would have loved to have chosen what my last meal would be, I realized that I wasn't in control of that. It didn't matter to the robber that my last meal would be a cheaply put together mid-day snack product. All that mattered to them was that they got the money that they wanted/"deserved" and got the hell out of there.

And the whole idea that everyone's life flashes before their eyes is bullshit. Sometimes peoples minds are a lot more structured than that when they're in a hostage situation. After having been kicked down to the floor and forced to wiggle with my chest and legs down (you try doing that and tell me how easy it is, stupid fucking criminals) into a small room with 9 other people in it, the last thing I was thinking about was my 5th birthday party. I was more or less thinking about how I was going to push the other people I didn't know so that I could make room for my aging father and older sister. Basically, I didn't want to have to see them get kicked down on the floor like I was.

The whole process is hard to believe, especially if you're living it in that precise moment. At the time, it didn't feel like a robbery to me. It just felt like a common emergency drill or another scene from a bad law/criminal justice show on late night television. There was no one guy that tried to be a hero because we all knew that this was reality and this is what we had to be put through.