"It was a disaster"

Then there's the way home. The sting. You did the thing, the walk, the sentence, the meal alone, and on the way back it comes up again and again, and each time it's slightly worse. The hop at the kerb is now a fall. The small silence after the joke is now a long one. And the sting presents itself as the fair report, the one you were too flustered to write at the time.

It isn't fair, and there's a reason. Go back to Savitsky, Epley and Gilovich in chapter 6. Part of why actors expected harsher judgement than they got was that they were fixed on their own misfortune and failed to weigh the situational things an onlooker weighs. That's a description of the sting. On the way home, you have the moment and nothing else. The onlooker, at the time, had the moment plus the pavement, plus the fact that they'd hopped at kerbs, plus whatever they were thinking about before you appeared, and gave the moment about a second before their own life resumed. You're giving it the whole bus ride.

I'd put it this way. The sting is a second run of the beam, with the room removed and you left in. It feels like review, but the reviewer only has one witness, and the witness was the person under the light. It's the least reliable account of the moment available. The reliable account is the shoe count, if you did one, and if you didn't, it's the fact that you can't picture a single onlooker's face, which is the strongest evidence you have that they can't picture yours.

If the sting has become a habit of its own, hours of it, days of it, then the book you want is It's already over, in this series, which is about replaying mistakes. Here I'll only say what to do with the sting in the moment, which is to answer it with the numbers. What was the headcount. What was the shoe count. What did you actually see when you looked. Three facts, said plainly, and then the book or the window.