Today I stepped on a thumb tack.
And I learnt two things:
- It’s every bit as painful as you’d expect it to be.
- Despite #1, you still get over it pretty quickly.
I was stumbling out of bed, and as soon as I put all my weight on the sole of my foot (and subsequently the thumbtack under it), I realized my mistake. In that tenth of a second, a lot of thoughts went through my head.
“Holy F*CK!”
“Hey hey I knew we were missing one from the poster.”
“Nikhil you have practice tonight, good luck explaining this one to them.”
Yes, it feels exactly like how you think it would. A tiny, bitter and angry little skewer going right into the vulnerable flesh of your underfoot. Naturally, I pulled it out immediately and inspected the leg, but the hole was pretty small (thumbtacks aren’t that large to begin with). In comparison to the size of my foot, it was a tiny dot.
Within five minutes, most of the pain was gone. Bear in mind, I still shiver at the thought that 150 pounds of me pressing down on that thumbtack but looking back on it, the pain dissipated quite quickly.
And that’s an encouraging thought.
We get over a lot of things pretty well. Sure, they’re painful in the moment, but wait a couple of minutes and it’ll be hard to even recreate the pain in your mind. Which is pretty awesome, in my opinion.
Because my life currently has a lot of thumbtacks lying around, whether it’s hell week or an exceptionally difficult homework or a seven hour Saturday practice or not calling my relatives on their birthdays or important events… Sidestepping these potential failures is hard.
And from time to time I step right on them, and it sucks. It sucks screwing up on hell week, it sucks not understanding that homework and running out of time.
But we find a way to get over it. Just like my brilliant immune system patching up that half inch puncture in my foot, our minds and bodies bounce back pretty quickly.
I hope you don’t get a thumbtack in your foot anytime soon, reader. But if you do, I think you’ll get over it pretty quickly.
