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META | WRITING | SILVER LININGS
I Stole Something Worth 5 Pence and Then Earned $65 Writing About It
This is the silver lining of being humiliated at the hands of a supermarket.
I was recently looking through the data from the Medium Earnings extension, which shows me how much I have earned from each story I have published.
It was fascinating because I hadn’t really noticed the quantities creeping up and up over the weeks and months, but I was really pleased to see how well some stories had done.
As I scrolled further and further down the list, I came to a story that I wrote back in May.
It was written in response to a prompt by KiKi Walter to write about the dumbest thing I had ever gotten into trouble over. It was a story from my student days — the incident had imprinted deeply on my mind at the time, and lingered long after.
The dumb thing was stealing a small piece of Blu Tack — some adhesive putty for sticking posters and other lightweight decorations to walls — from an already opened packet in a supermarket. At the time, it seemed a harmless thing to do because the packet wouldn’t have been sellable anymore, and I had run out of the stuff just before finishing the decorating of my new room in…
