Trigger warning: how it feels to get shot

I got shot in the leg last week. I live in Chicago, in the Hyde Park neighbourhood, which traditionally doesn’t see a lot of shootings. Hyde Park surrounds the University of Chicago and the University Police Department is the third-largest armed force in Illinois. Hyde Park is where Barack Obama lived (about six blocks from me) before he had to take a job out of town. Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle lives on my street. She controls about half of the patronage for the Chicago political machine, including jobs with the sheriff’s department. I’ve walked all over Hyde Park at all hours for 30 years, un-shot the entire time.

But at 3.10 a.m. on Friday, I was walking home from a late-night writing session at a colleague’s apartment a block from my house. (I work as a games designer.) A car pulled up, and two guys with guns jumped out and aggressively requested my 2014 MacBook Air.