A dog bit me today. Twice.
This dog bit my finger a couple of years ago.
But today, what stayed with me wasn’t the bite itself. Not the teeth, not the shock, not the bruising or the fact it’s my friend’s dog.
It was the feeling that followed, the quiet and immediate fear of this dog and also somehow that I don’t have permission to feel it.
A friend once told me she couldn’t trust people who don’t like dogs. I remember how easily that sentence entered me, how it settled somewhere permanent. I don’t think I questioned it. I think I filed it away as a kind of moral truth.
And now I find myself on the wrong side of it.
I used to like dogs. That feels like a fact growing up, one that still exists somewhere, unchanged, as if it’s waiting for me to come back and agree with it again.
But I don’t.
Shortly after the first attack by my friend’s dog, another dog in my neighborhood attacked me on a run, ripped through my leggings taking a chunk of my leg.
And what unsettles me now isn’t just how my friend dismissed the attack again. It’s this new version of me is somehow too cautious, too flinching, too scared of dogs and seemingly less trustworthy.
But when fear comes from experience, something shifts. One day you realize you’re no longer just feeling, you’re measuring. Measuring your reactions against rules you never agreed to, but somehow learned anyway.
And I find myself wondering why this, of all things, still feels like it needs permission.
Why a response shaped by my own body, my own history, still asks to be justified.
How many times does something have to happen before you’re allowed to let it change you.
How many times do I need to be bitten before I’m allowed to say, simply, that I’m not okay with dogs. At least for now.
