Member-only story
Antifragility
Why some of the worst things that happened to you might be making you stronger
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I was five or six when I split my ear in two. I fell off a wall I had no business climbing, caught the ear on something sharp on the way down — a nail, a hook, the universe’s sense of humour, who knows — and by the time I looked up, there was blood everywhere and my ear was hanging in a way ears should not hang. And that visual made my sister throw up her lunch and that’s how I got my first stitches.
I remember my father, standing in the emergency room with the energy of a man whose evening tea had been interrupted. But before that, at home, do you know what his words were? He looked at the ground where I’d fallen and said, “See? You killed the ant.”
Not “are you okay“ or “ oh baby…that must hurt.” You killed the ant. Classic Indian parenting. The child is bleeding from the head and the adult’s humour is worse than the child’s. I remember lying there with a needle going through my ear cartilage thinking about that innocent ant, and something about the absurdity of it made me stop crying. Of course the pain did not go away. But the situation had become so ridiculous that pain wasn’t the most interesting thing happening anymore.
