Someone Threw Dog Poo at Me: What I Chose to Carry Forward

One horrible moment does not have to become the whole story

I never expected to say this sentence: someone threw dog poo at me while I was running.

It was shocking, disgusting and upsetting.

My brain immediately wanted an explanation. Why would someone do that? Why me? What had I done?

But sometimes the answer is simply that another person behaved badly.

What interested me afterwards was what happened in my own head.

One cruel act was loud. Yet there were also people who checked I was okay, kindness from strangers and hundreds of previous runs where nothing like that had happened.

Both things were true.

I did not want to pretend the bad thing was secretly good. It wasn’t.

I also did not want one person’s behaviour to become my permanent story about running, people or the world.

That is what resilience looks like to me now.

Not pretending you are unaffected. Not suppressing anger or upset.

Acknowledging what happened, doing what you need to do, and then deciding what you are willing to carry forward.

I reported the incident. I talked about it. I cleaned myself up.

And I planned to go outside again.

Sometimes we cannot control what lands in our day.

The experience made me think again about how we build resilience and about how negativity bias can make one bad moment feel bigger than dozens of ordinary good ones.

We can still have some choice over how much space we give it afterwards.