Beyond Selidor

I often think about forks in the road, but usually not about choices I made so much as wondering what it would have been like if I got support at a certain point, or suchlike.

One of the big ones is that I was best at maths and chemistry in school, and my father was a chemist, but teachers encouraged me into the humanities instead (though I ended up in office admin), and I wonder what life would be like had someone put two and two together and encouraged me to become a chemist like my father.

The other is wondering what it might be like had anyone helped me learn healthy coping mechanisms before I had a nervous breakdown at 19 (at which point my family finally had the internet, so I looked them up on google 😂). I probably would have graduated uni the same time as my peers instead of finally gaining my bachelor degree at the age of 35, and ended up in completely different career, earning different things, maybe living in a different place. But this is honestly something that would lead to such a wildly divergent outcome that I can't truly imagine it anymore.

The big change I made in my own life was moving to Melbourne in my mid 20s, and it didn't feel like taking another path was an option if I wanted a long, healthy life, so I can't say I want to imagine a different path.