Eat the Burnt Toast

On an episode of a storytelling podcast called “The Moth”, the theme for the night was about ‘flirting with disaster’, and one of the storytellers got up and spoke about how he frequented a gay bar in Milwaukee in the 80’s and he was so infatuated with one mysterious good looking man at the bar who would always go home with a different stranger. The storyteller was crushed that he never got picked up, to the point that even when he was the last guy available, the stranger still decided to leave alone.

…come to find out, it was Jeffrey Dahmer who was taking boys home from that bar…

Yes, THE Jeffrey Dahmer.

Seth MacFarlane, creator and star of the television series Family Guy and American Dad missed one of the 9/11 flights because of a hangover.

Let’s say you are making toast for breakfast in the morning, for example, but burn it to the point it is inedible. So, you have to spend another five minutes making a new piece. You are now running a bit late for work or an important meeting, so you decide to use a different route on the way there to try and save time. You finally arrive at your destination; annoyed and in a bad mood because of a piece of burnt toast. You turn on the radio or are scrolling through the news and realize there was an explosion, on the same road you usually use to go to work. And it happened at the same time you were making the new piece of toast. If you had not burnt your toast that morning, you could’ve been one of the casualties.

This is the phenomenon known as “burnt toast theory”. A principle I discovered on TikTok that sums up a wonderful way to look at the inconveniences of life.

You can twist it in other ways where the delay meant you wrapped up work a little later in the evening, and you end up bumping into an old friend and reconnecting, turning into a beautiful love story. The whole idea can be summed up as blessings in disguise, whether this inconvenience prevented a negative event or led up to a positive outcome.

I’ve had my share of burnt toast the last 2 weeks. I’ve had to make sense of setbacks and trust that they are clearing the path for something better to come. It left me a bit weak, disappointed, scared and frankly tired of trying. But on the other hand, it gave me time to rest for the first time in a long time, helped me find immense clarity, gave me a ton of epiphanies, made me more mindful and I started being kinder and more compassionate with myself. And while we all want the power and ability to make these decisions for ourselves, some of us (me) need to be hit over the head in order to realize this.

Something that I believe I’ll be working on for the rest of my life is maintaining a sense of inner peace, no matter what situation I’m facing. As a generally anxious person, I’ve noticed that I fuss over things that people don’t think twice about and I waste a lot of time and energy worrying. I’ll place “what if” scenarios on things that are going perfectly fine until the event itself or the possibility of it going wrong has passed. I definitely get suspicious if things are seemingly going “too well”, as if some calamity is going to hit because I’ve used up my happiness quota.

I’m always holding my breath.

In the face of a small inconvenience or setback, many of us are likely to catastrophize and make a mountain out of a molehill. You’re obviously not alone because you’ve probably seen many mountains, but have you ever seen a molehill? Lol, what I mean is do you see the reality of your situation for what it is rather than what you’re afraid of it being?

These days I am the type of person who tells themselves that everything happens for a reason. I find comfort in tracing lines between the worst moments of my life and the best, noting the doors that closed, people who left and situations that arose — because they all lead me to a point of happiness or good fortune.

In the course of our lives, we experience an inconvenient sequence of events that when you look back, ends up saving a person’s life.

Life’s inconveniences have a purpose. Perceptions of fortune and misfortune can change with time.

It’s about giving reason to the moments of frustration or pain and it’s us telling ourselves that no matter what happens, the universe has our back. This is a coping mechanism I love and employ regularly. Instead of blowing inconveniences out of proportion, I try to put my imagination to better use. I make up scenarios to explain why this issue could be for the better, telling myself it may have prevented this or that from happening instead.

By twisting a little annoying event that happened in your day to be the thing that saved your life, it has helped me not let little unexpected events that are out of my control, like a piece of burnt toast, set the tone for the rest of my day. Accepting these little interruptions as happy accidents can make you feel more grounded and at peace. Even if there’s no way to prove that a piece of burnt toast saved your life, it is one way to look at life a bit more optimistically.

Life is crazy as we all know and sometimes it seems like we’re being tested. However, if there’s one thing we can control it’s how we react to our circumstances. I like that, personally, it’s as simple as acknowledging what I’m feeling and thinking a little differently to my default (and unhelpful) catastrophizing. I thought I would share my experience with this mindset rewiring hack and I hope it’s added something to your inventory in this game of life.

When bad things happen, you might not know exactly why, but you simply have to trust that it was done for your greater good.

Eat the burnt toast…it doesn’t taste that bad.