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dolorosa_12The Friday open thread is back for another week. This week's prompt is all about points in your life where your choices diverged, and you chose (or fell onto) one path as opposed to another. But it's also about where you might have ended up if you'd chosen otherwise.
For me, there was one very clear moment in which my life branched off in a specific direction, and if things hadn't happened as that did in that specific moment, my life would have been very different.
After I graduated from my undergrad degree, I kind of panicked, and wound up back in my home town, working as a subeditor for the broadsheet newspaper there (I had been writing book reviews for that paper for the past four years while I was a student). I was miserable — especially since (as both my parents were journalists and almost all the adults I knew growing up worked in journalism) I had always assumed I'd end up working with the written word in a journalistic context, and had no clear idea of what I'd do if this didn't work out. (What I really wanted to do was keep working the weekend/holiday job I'd done while I was a student — shop assistant in a family-run patisserie and chocolate shop — while continuing to write book reviews but not relying on my writing as the sole source of income and figure out what to do next in a leisurely way.)
In any case, after a few months of this, I wanted to get out, and made a decision based almost solely on the metric of 'what can I do that isn't this, but which my mum will approve of?' and somehow landed on the idea of applying to do postgraduate study. The subject in which I had majored, and written my honours thesis, was not taught in Australia at postgraduate level, and my old undergraduate supervisor advised me to apply at Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Harvard. I ruled out Harvard almost immediately due to the need to undertake a standardised test, with maths questions, which I'd have to pay for, as part of the application, and the potential supervisor at Oxford never replied to my email, so that left Cambridge and Edinburgh. I got accepted at both, but Cambridge was going to fund my studies with a scholarship and Edinburgh wasn't, so that made the decision easy — I moved to the UK, and my life unfolded in the way that it did.
There's obviously another version of my life where I got accepted with funding at Edinburgh and moved there, but the more extreme divergence would have been if I didn't get accepted for postgraduate studies at any of these places, or never applied. I don't know how much longer I would have grimly persisted in the subediting job (I was calling up my mum daily in tears every lunch break, my social life was exclusively chatting online in the IRC chatroom with the Philip Pullman forum people, and I used to fantasise on my walk into work each day that a car might hit me when I was crossing the street and I'd be taken into hospital and not have to go to work, so...), but if I'd stayed in journalism in some capacity, I assume I would have been made redundant at some point during the decades-long cuts that swept through the Australian (and indeed global) media landscape.
However, what I suspect would have happened if I'd not emigrated is that at some point between 2008-2010 I would have undertaken a librarianship MA in Australia and ended up working as an academic librarian, since one of my good friends from undergrad did exactly that, and it would have occurred to me that this was a suitable career for me in terms of my interests, abilities and temperament. As I would have lacked the teaching experience (gained while I was a PhD student) that landed me the specific kind of academic library work I do now, I probably would have ended up doing something more collections-related rather than teaching or research support, but essentially I would have been an academic librarian in Australia. So, if the path that led me to where I am now was blocked, I would have ended up in a different country, definitely not married to the person I am now, definitely not with the British citizenship I have now (to my mind the three most important things in my life), but probably with a very similar job.
What about you? Can you identify specific points where you were faced with two (or more) diverging paths with profound effect on your life? And if you had taken another path at those points, what would your life look like now?
For me, there was one very clear moment in which my life branched off in a specific direction, and if things hadn't happened as that did in that specific moment, my life would have been very different.
After I graduated from my undergrad degree, I kind of panicked, and wound up back in my home town, working as a subeditor for the broadsheet newspaper there (I had been writing book reviews for that paper for the past four years while I was a student). I was miserable — especially since (as both my parents were journalists and almost all the adults I knew growing up worked in journalism) I had always assumed I'd end up working with the written word in a journalistic context, and had no clear idea of what I'd do if this didn't work out. (What I really wanted to do was keep working the weekend/holiday job I'd done while I was a student — shop assistant in a family-run patisserie and chocolate shop — while continuing to write book reviews but not relying on my writing as the sole source of income and figure out what to do next in a leisurely way.)
In any case, after a few months of this, I wanted to get out, and made a decision based almost solely on the metric of 'what can I do that isn't this, but which my mum will approve of?' and somehow landed on the idea of applying to do postgraduate study. The subject in which I had majored, and written my honours thesis, was not taught in Australia at postgraduate level, and my old undergraduate supervisor advised me to apply at Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburgh, and Harvard. I ruled out Harvard almost immediately due to the need to undertake a standardised test, with maths questions, which I'd have to pay for, as part of the application, and the potential supervisor at Oxford never replied to my email, so that left Cambridge and Edinburgh. I got accepted at both, but Cambridge was going to fund my studies with a scholarship and Edinburgh wasn't, so that made the decision easy — I moved to the UK, and my life unfolded in the way that it did.
There's obviously another version of my life where I got accepted with funding at Edinburgh and moved there, but the more extreme divergence would have been if I didn't get accepted for postgraduate studies at any of these places, or never applied. I don't know how much longer I would have grimly persisted in the subediting job (I was calling up my mum daily in tears every lunch break, my social life was exclusively chatting online in the IRC chatroom with the Philip Pullman forum people, and I used to fantasise on my walk into work each day that a car might hit me when I was crossing the street and I'd be taken into hospital and not have to go to work, so...), but if I'd stayed in journalism in some capacity, I assume I would have been made redundant at some point during the decades-long cuts that swept through the Australian (and indeed global) media landscape.
However, what I suspect would have happened if I'd not emigrated is that at some point between 2008-2010 I would have undertaken a librarianship MA in Australia and ended up working as an academic librarian, since one of my good friends from undergrad did exactly that, and it would have occurred to me that this was a suitable career for me in terms of my interests, abilities and temperament. As I would have lacked the teaching experience (gained while I was a PhD student) that landed me the specific kind of academic library work I do now, I probably would have ended up doing something more collections-related rather than teaching or research support, but essentially I would have been an academic librarian in Australia. So, if the path that led me to where I am now was blocked, I would have ended up in a different country, definitely not married to the person I am now, definitely not with the British citizenship I have now (to my mind the three most important things in my life), but probably with a very similar job.
What about you? Can you identify specific points where you were faced with two (or more) diverging paths with profound effect on your life? And if you had taken another path at those points, what would your life look like now?
no subject
Date: 2023-07-21 01:21 pm (UTC)The first is that when I was a child, my parents (who moved our family around a lot when we were younger) decided it was time to move back to Canada and settle in one place. There were several different places in Canada that were under consideration, and I could just as easily ended up growing up in an entirely different province or even just a different city in the province we did end up in, with different schools and different friends and different nearby extended family and different important adults in my life. Or if we'd stayed living in white rural conservative united states instead....who would I have been, growing up under those social influences? But because my family moved where and when we did, I met the defining person in my life, my best friend since middle school who is my partner in adulthood. E and I shaped each other so much as we grew up together that I literally cannot imagine what kind of person I would have been without E's influence!
The second is that in the final month of my undergraduate degree I was hit by a car and had a severe concussion with side effects lasting more than a year. This entirely derailed what paths were open to me as I made the transition away from being a student. My career path would likely look entirely different, since the job I eventually ended up with after I'd sufficiently recovered from the concussion was one I only got via happenstance, and that job kind of shaped my career path since then. What would I have ended up doing instead? What jobs would I have found opportunities for if I had been able to graduate on time and start job searching immediately post-degree? I'm really not sure! As well, I think that the concussion did permanently change some things in my brain; I developed insomnia and increased anxiety after that, which have also been fairly life-shaping. I'm happy with where I've ended up after all this, but I do wonder if and how much my life might have been easier if the concussion hadn't happened.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-22 03:39 pm (UTC)The car accident, on the other hand, is obviously a much more difficult rupture — your description of that event as a derailment seems entirely correct. What a scary thing to be dealing with at a time of your life when your future path seemed clear and full of options. And with insomia and anxiety too — life-shaping, as you say, but very difficult to live with.