How Getting Robbed At Gunpoint Gave Me More Confidence
It was winter of 2010. I was on the bus home at 6:30pm after finishing a day of classes on campus. It was rainy and already dark out.
I got off at my stop, only one block away from the apartment complex I lived in.
As I got ready to enter the side door towards the apartment complex, I saw a shadow flicker on the door and immediately sensed, “something is about to happen.”
The very next moment, a hooded teen stood in front of me and pointed a small pistol at my face. “Give me your backpack.”
“Whoa… okay,” I said.
Another hooded teen stood behind me while the first guy rummaged through my backpack to see if he scored anything impressive.
I asked tentatively, “Can I have my books back?” (Yes, I was that kid in college, concerned about studying and getting a good grade on my upcoming organic chemistry exam).
To my surprise they dropped my books on the ground.
“Thank you!” they said mockingly before turning around and running away.
——
To say this event impacted me is an understatement.
For several months after I lived in a constant state of paranoia.
I made arrangements to sleep over at my friend’s dorm the nights my classes ran late.
Anytime I entered my apartment complex I would glance over my shoulders and try to get inside as quick as possible.
The other side of this paranoia was deep rage.
I entertained violent fantasies about hunting those two teens down and enacting vengeance on them and their entire family. My mom was understandably upset and said, “you can’t do that!” I wasn’t ever going to act on those fantasies; it was simply an outlet to grasp at any sort of power I could find after having felt so disempowered and vulnerable.
The rage manifested itself physically a few days later as a hive-like rash that covered my neck and shoulders.
Between paranoia, rage, and a distorted attention-whore dynamic (I felt special in that I could tell my friends I got robbed at gunpoint and get a reaction from them) I was looping in a state of victimhood.
Then one unexpected thing shifted this experience. Breakdancing.
I started to spend more time around a friend of mine who is a breakdancer (or “bboy”).
Something about the style of music, movement, and attitude of breakdancing felt like exactly what I needed.
It was a conducive outlet for me to transmute the rage and grief into passion and self-mastery.
The more I danced and interacted with other bboys, the more I experienced a reclamation of what I felt I had lost.
I didn’t recognize this at the time, but the confidence that grew from this time period wasn’t because breakdancing added more confidence into me like you’d add cream into coffee.
My confidence grew because:
1) I was enjoying the process of mastering the technical and musical side of expressing myself through dance, a process of self-
discovery.
2) I was experiencing life, momentum, and possibility after being robbed at gunpoint.
What frequently happens when we go through disturbing events is that our mind freezes that moment and blows it up into HD detail in our unconscious mind. Imagine it like an after-image frozen on your computer screen which blocks you from seeing anything else.
The disturbing event is over, we’ve survived, but our unconscious mind is still processing the data as though it’s still happening. There’s no sense of a future because mind has been stuck.
Breakdancing was a tangible experience to me that let me know, “I can experience joy, fun, tenacity, and friendship even after getting robbed at gunpoint.”
In a way, life became sweeter because I got to experience and discover more of myself beyond how I knew myself previously and beyond a single event that was only a small blip in my life.
This experience gave me an embodied understanding of Jung’s quote, “we are not what happened to us, we are what we wish to become.”
There is nothing more empowering than to realize that you can experience something difficult, troubling, or horrendous and still come out the other side more open, grounded, tenacious, and grateful.
The greatest tragedy of this experience would not have been the getting robbed part. The greatest tragedy would have been if I had locked myself in a mental and emotional prison of my own making and sentenced myself to being defined by a single moment in my life.
Instead I chose to dance.
This is a little solo practice I did at a friend’s house when I was in Japan back in 2011. You can tell it was recorded in photobooth with an old Macbook 😂
Thank you for taking the time to read.
If you are interested in:
Psychospiritual inner work
Relationships + masculine/feminine polarity
Existential musings
Insights on collective consciousness
Subscribe to my newsletter for weekly teachings and story-telling that will empower you on your journey of awakening.
Peace,
Roy