Friday open thread: forking paths, sliding doors

[dolorosa_12]

The 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?

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

I've actually been kind of exploring this in a just-for-fun writing side project I have going - if, instead of sacrificing my big dream of pursuing acting in order to care for my brothers, I'd left them and gone to the performing arts high school all my friends went to. I don't know if there was a career for me in acting - my last director told me there wasn't, because I wasn't pretty enough to be a lead or funny-looking enough to be a character actress - but on a personal level, if I'd lived a life in which the biggest trauma of my life didn't happen, if I'd been less isolated and lonely, if I'd had the opportunity to develop my own confidence and self-reliance before people took advantage of my vulnerabilities, I think a lot of things would have turned out very, very differently. It's hard to say where I'd be; possibly I'd have emigrated earlier, or possibly I'd still be trying to. Possibly I'd have a stable career, possibly I'd be just as precarious in another field of work. I really think I'd just be a completely different person, and it's hard for me to even imagine where that person's life would've led them.

[used_songs]

I had always planned to go straight through and get a PhD and teach at a university, but after I got the MA I was so burned out and disenchanted with that life that I instead did my teacher certification. If I had stayed in academia, based on experiences of friends who did I would've had to move if I could've even found a position. I wouldn't be as close as I am to my parents and I wouldn't have met E. My whole life would be different.

I actually started the application process for the FBI (to be an analyst, not a cop) when I had a year or two of teaching under my belt, but I desisted pretty quickly, knowing that my political history and complete aversion to guns would disqualify me. I don't think they would've taken me, but in that case again I would've moved and had very different relationships.

The only positive for me in both cases would be (probably) getting the hell out of Texas. But I wouldn't have met E, I would've only seen my parents on holidays, I wouldn't have this house, I wouldn't have Ella, etc.

[raven]

I was supposed to be a doctor. My dreadful mother badgered me relentlessly about it my last two years of school (and tried to change my A-level choices at one point) and finally, to get her off my back, I said I'd apply for two things at once: PPE at Oxford, which is what I did in the end, and a bunch of medical schools as well. In retrospect I hate her for this, but also myself for going along with it. I got into both, of course, and turned down King's for medicine. I have no idea what would have happened if I'd gone for it - maybe I'd have just dropped out after a year or two? But if I had gone for it, I'd never have met any of the people I met at Ox, including my partner, I'd have done my professional training probably somewhere else other than Cambridge and London, and given up on the writing because there would be no way to do it at the same time as being a junior doctor. (Me giving up on the writing - something else my mother was very keen on!)

The other thing doesn't really count because it wasn't my choice, but my parents came within a hair of going back to India when I was about eight or nine. That's the one that blows my mind because it's really clear - I know which school in Delhi I'd have gone to, and what house I'd have lived in, and even what my post-secondary education would have looked like. The funny thing about that one is that it might actually have reconverged - I might still have done PPE at Ox and met the same people. But I guess I'll never know.

[sophia_sol]

This is something that's come to my mind repeatedly over the years, with respect to two major turning points in my life, but I don't actually have very good answers for the specifics of how my life would have looked if those things hadn't happened!

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.

[nerakrose]

I have more than one of these! but I think the one most identifiable happened when I was a teenager in boarding school. in Denmark one finishes school after 9th grade, but it's very common to take an optional 10th grade before moving on to any of the secondary programmes (STX for getting into university, HHX, HTX, HF which are more trade and business based, any of the trade programmes like bookseller, carpenter, mechanic, hairdresser, etc.) or starting work without any training or schooling at all. it's also very common to do that 10th grade at a boarding school, and slightly less common but very possible to do 9th grade at boarding school as well. the boarding school I went to did both 9th and 10th grade and in fact taught us all together so we had the same curriculum.

what happened while I was there, doing my 10th grade optional year and improving my grades in German amongst other things, was that the government finally announced a start date for the STX reform. STX used to be 2 distinct lines, the mathematical line and the language line. if you were going into STEM you'd take the mathematical line and if you were going into anything else, you'd take the language line. these lines had been criticised for not being specific enough - the mathematical line forced you to take "too many" humanities subjects including languages so in reality the two lines were the same except the mathematical line had higher level STEM subjects, so was harder to complete. so there was going to be a reform and now STX would be offering 7 different lines with different specialisations. I didn't care because I was going to go to STX and do the mathematical line because that would keep the doors open for me to decide *later* whether to go to into STEM or the humanities or something else - I couldn't decide if I wanted to be an astrophysicist or a linguist, see. (or an archaeologist, or a microbiologist, or study literature, etc. etc.) the reform would remove doors for me because the more specialised lines meant you wouldn't be able to take enough of all the subjects at high enough levels that you could potentially get into ALL the university subjects, but would be locking yourself into narrower paths. the reform didn't concern me because I would finish boarding school and go to STX as the last generation to do the Old Lines Before The Reform because the reform wasn't starting until the following school year.

except. one of the reasons I went to boarding school is because I desperately needed to improve my social skills and gain confidence in who I was as a person and learn independence and a wealth of other 'soft' skills that I didn't possess, having gone to weirdly specialised schools and been put into specialised classes for 'children with disabilities' (which meant that I'd been in the same classes as children with learning disabilities and lesser mental capacity and other issues that were not compatible with me and my needs - I just had a hearing loss, I wasn't stupid or too paralysed to communicate or whatever - and so didn't learn any social skills at all. this wasn't unique to me btw, the system was Bad so all disabled children were put together as if we were all cut from the same cloth) and when it came time to apply for STX I realised that I was Not Ready. I needed another year to work on myself before re-entering the real world (not that boarding school isn't the real world, but because it's not mandatory schooling they are kind of like experimental bubbles focused more on personal development than academic results. my school specialised in democracy, philosophy, arts, and athletics, essentially educating compassionate future citizens from a holistic starting point of physical health and mind leading to enlightened critical thinkers). so I had to decide: do I want to prioritise my personal wellbeing and development or do I want to prioritise my future career? I was 16. I chose myself. instead of taking the 10th grade exam (which can only be taken once) I re-took the 9th grade test (which is only a test and can be re-taken as many times as one wants).

so I spent another year at boarding school and then went to STX and had to pick a specialised Line and then the Line I chose wasn't even offered because too few students chose it (5 students, it was the modern languages line) so I wound up getting put into another Line focused on social sciences. I wasn't able to take Chemistry as a side subject at all, it simply wasn't offered, so the only STEM subject I was able to take was Physics C or B, Maths C or B, Natural Geography C and Biology C. After I did my C level STEM subjects I had to upgrade two of them to B level but I found a loophole, I upgraded Physics to B and instead of upgrading Maths to B I instead upgraded German from B to A and Social Sciences from B to A. (it was more complicated than that, but basically that's how that worked out.) by keeping Maths at C level I was closing more doors for myself to ever get into any STEM courses at uni because they all required at least Maths B. and the reason why I didn't want to upgrade Maths after how much frustrated I'd been by not being able to choose STEM subjects? I was spending 4 hours every week doing Maths problems and then another 3 hours copying them out cleanly onto fresh sheets of paper to hand in, because nobody had taught me how to set this up in excel so I wouldn't have to copy them out afterwards, and my STX school refused to take the time to teach us (all my classmates had been taught at their primary schools). and if I didn't copy them over cleanly I would be marked down simply for 'poor presentation' even though the problems themselves were all correctly solved. I didn't want to go through another year of that absolute bullshit, I didn't have the TIME to spend 7 hours every week just on fucking maths problems and an outdated view when I also had 4 essays to write on weekly basis for other subjects + all my daily reading. I didn't have a social life because all I did was study. I didn't even watch any TV the three years I was in STX. I was marked down for poor presentation ANYWAY so towards the end of the year I simply stopped copying them over and submitted my working sheets because it made absolutely no difference to my marks but it did gain me 3 more hours every week to just breathe. a whole year of not having a single error in any maths problems and I never got a top mark because my teacher didn't like my handwriting and didn't like me, and refused to teach me excel to save me the time and effort and improve my presentation. fuck that shit. I am, as you can tell, still angry about it. it's been almost twenty years but seriously FUCK that shit.

so yeah I wound up in the humanities because I had to make hard choices at a very young age that could not be corrected for later. (one can as an adult take single subjects through HF to get into specific university courses, unfortunately this is one of the few areas of Danish education that is not free, so it was never an option for me to upgrade Maths to B or A after I finished STX, for any of the other STEM subjects for the matter.)

In another life I might have become an astro or nuclear physicist. I might also have become an archaeologist or palaeontologist (I decided against that very early because all my research led to having to go the USA for some portion of postgrad or PHD for it and I simply refused to entertain the thought of living in the USA, ever, for any reason. I still do). I can't really imagine what that would've been like, because I would've become a completely different person than I am now and not only because I would've missed out on a year of boarding school and personal development when I needed it most. I'm not sure if I did meet the alternative universe me who made those other choices, that I would recognise them as myself.

as for my somewhat flaky humanities career: I probably would've ended up in publishing anyway. editor/publisher is one of the many careers I've always wanted to do, in Denmark it requires a BA and MA in Literature and I ended up studying Finnish instead, but I was involved with school papers and the like as an editor and proofreader, and for much of my time in fandom I was running fests (very similar to project managing books tbh) and betaing for other people, and so on and so forth, I've always involved myself with writing and stories somehow. had I been accepted at any of the publishing jobs I tried for in Denmark over the years, my publishing career would've looked very different and I probably would never have come to the UK. I certainly wouldn't have done the publishing MA. I would probably have met many of the same people because publishing as an industry is very international and we translate and publish each others books, and meet each other at book fairs, but it wouldn't have been exactly the same.

[isis]

I can think of two very big turning points in my life, which actually happened within six months of each other: dropping out of graduate school with a master's instead of pursuing the doctorate, and breaking up with the long-term boyfriend I was living with in order to move in with another man. (Reader, I married him.) As far as I can tell, in terms of net happiness for me and a future interesting life path, I made the right decision in both cases!

[lirazel]

(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.)


Was there a reason you couldn't do this? Because honestly that sounds like a lovely life!

I feel like my life is nothing but a series of these things. But I would say the biggest one that comes to mind is when I decided to leave my mind-numbing data entry job and move across the country to live with a fandom friend. Jamie was like, "Come live with me!" and...I did! I was only there for not quite three years, but I got my first library job there (which lead to more library jobs, which lead to grad school, which lead to archives, which lead me here), which I definitely would not have been able to get in my hometown.

I think it also taught me I could move on my own, which is something I've done at least four more times since then. I definitely like my life a ton more now than I liked it in my mid-20s before I moved!

I have absolutely no clue what my life would have looked life if I'd stayed in my hometown. No clue at all!

[lyr]

I've had a lot of those forks in the road, really. If I hadn't had such a brutal breakup with my rhythm guitarist (she tried to get me to commit suicide), I probably wouldn't have given up music as a career. And if, following that, I hadn't taken a job tutoring while I was working toward becoming a research biologist and realized how much I love teaching, I wouldn't have moved into academia. And even if I had decided to become a professor, it would have been as a biologist if I hadn't had some awful experiences in the field and slid sideways into rhetoric and writing instead.

[thawrecka]

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.

[gingicat]

My biggest regret is my first marriage, but it did get me into convention fandom where I met a lot of people who became friends. That person also introduced me to Spider Robinson's books, which led me to investigate alt.callahans and alt.music.filk (later rec.music.filk) where I met a lot more people who became friends. The convergence of convention-fandom and Usenet-fandom caused me to meet my second husband, which I definitely don't regret.

There are interesting professional turns as well - had my interest in a professional blue-collar certificate and apprenticeship been taken seriously after I got my BA (which was definitely important and also led to the above), I'd likely have become an electrician and would be living in a house I own. I do love being an office manager in a place that appreciates my intelligence and eclectic skills and accommodates my ADHD, though.

[corvidology]

Oddly enough, my first instance of this was when I was a young child and it was beyond my control. I say 'oddly' in that my parents were planning to emigrate to Australia (*g*) when my mother finally found out about one of my father's many affairs and divorced him.

Besides that, there are too many to count, include being offered places to read Chemistry, Biochemistry, Zoology, Literature and Film at uni. My mother has never forgiven me for turning down the Cambridge offer for Chemistry.

Too many to count but I can honestly say I don't think about them at all unless someone asks a question like this. *g* I've spent my life bobbing along with the waves and currents, dealing with shipwrecks as they've happened and enjoying the successful voyages. I can't say I've made many deliberate decisions about diverging paths.

[chestnut_pod]

I made all my own educational decisions from the time I went to middle school (7th-8th grade, so around ages 11-13), and I'm sure any other decision would have sent me down a pretty profoundly different path. But I think the actual turning point was winning a scholarship to go on an international trip with my language class in my sophomore year of high school, actually the month I turned 15, to a particular city. I loved that city so much that I decided I had to study abroad there in my third year of university, which led me to the one and only program which had any offerings there, which was extremely academically intense and allowed me to do a researched thesis-type paper with interviews -- which became my MA thesis, which got me into my PhD, which got me to where I am right now!

[falena]

I have a master's in technical translation and while I quickly found out that I wasn't cut out to be a freelance translator for a while I wanted to try to be an in-house translator, only in-house positions are hard to come by in Italy and of course the largest employer of translators is the EU so while I was working in an office job I applied for several translation positions with the EU and went through the rigourous application process and was actually successful for one of the temporary supply translator posts. That meant my name was in a pool for a available translators for my working language combinations (English and French into Italian), ready to move to Brussels if one of the permanent translators fell sick or pregnant or something. That particular list was valid for three years. Alas I was never called during those three years (I suspect because my language combination was very 'boring/common' and there were are there people with higher ranking) and I didn't bother re-applying after that (it was a lengthy and costly process with translation tests that could be done only in Milan or Rome) but I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had been called...