So what I'm saying is, although our life is a constant progression of decisions and consequences, there's two points in my life at least which could have gone either way and the outcome hugely affected who I am as a person. I'm not unique in this I'm sure and I'm interested in whether or not you can identify points in your life where, given two or more paths, going down another path would have meant you, essentially, wouldn't be you, now.
Counting stuff that happened before I was born, my father's told me about several such experiences in his life, which as my biological origin, that certainly counts. His brief stint in the U.S. Navy lasted a year and seven months - the circumstances of his departure should have landed him in the stockade for a couple years, but thanks to some strategic socializing and buffoonery he never planned on, he got Honorably Discharged instead. Not long after, and just before I was born, he was nearly got a be a roadie for the Steve Miller Band, but turned it down to go back to college. After I was born, he got a job working for his step-father alongside his old girlfriend, which was a perfect storm of rage that convinced my parents to move cross-country for seven years, before returning to Texas on a whim.
I never thought about it before, but probably the best example in my own life was my last year of highschool. I was living with my father, when our house was nearly foreclosed on before he found a rock-bottom seller. He managed to hang onto it right up until the end of my 11th grade - we were packing furniture the week of finals. Being broke and homeless, we moved into a guest house his mother owned on the Oklahoma border. I was also badly in need of some dentistry at the time, and because they had never technically divorced, my mother got a good chunk of the money from the house. Between that and her insurance, I could get the work I needed, so I shuttled back and forth over the summer. Although I had barely seen my mother for the last five years, Dad's personality suffered bad from the stress (and substance withdrawal), so I used the scenario to strategically land myself in my mother's custody, when she proffered putting me up in an apartment in my old school district for a year.
This led to some pretty nasty blowups all around, but the big point is - I spent my last (and best) year of school where I mostly grew up, instead of the middle of bumfuck nowhere I might never have escaped from, because of my father's backfired finances and my screwed up teeth. It's funny how life works out. There's also the surprisingly large number of times I've cheated death or ruin by the skin of my teeth, sometimes without even realizing it, but those aren't as weird to describe.
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Topic: Choices, changes, butterflies and their ilk (Read 1686 times)