Defining Moments in Your Life

In My Humble Opinion
1

I am looking for examples of situations that had dramatic enough effects on your life to cause you to change course in some way. A moment in time when you really liked who you were to the point where you were on a bit of a natural high.

Some examples I have seen over the years: A nerdy little guy wins a dance contest in a crowded trendy bar. A quiet unpopular guy has a few drinks one night and for the first time becomes the life of the party. A lady is swept off her feet buy a guy she never dreamed would even look at her. Or a poem you sent in took first place in a poem contest. Anything, work related, hobby related, sex related, does not matter.

 I have a had a few moments like those in most areas of my life at one time or another. But it always had the reverse affect on me. I feel my happiest when I am considered a valued member of something but I am very uncomfortable if I somehow wind up at the top. I will usually drop out if that happens. If what appears to be the perfect woman of my dreams falling for me I find every reason that what she is falling in love with is not really me. 

  I have seen a lot of my friends just take it and run with it very often with great success,  mostly in my younger days but even in my sixties I still see it in my peers now and then.  

   Can anyone relate to what I am talking about?
2

This is weird and trivial and silly and stupid…but…

One day, I was feeling low. Down, and suicidal, and just miserable.

At some point during the day, I went to take a leak…and the stream of urine came out bifurcated, part missing the toilet bowl on the left and part missing it on the right. I could only choose one, so I aimed half into the toilet, and went later to mop up the rest.

But what it made me think was: this was so totally unexpected, it shows that there are still surprises left in life for me. It re-awakened me to a sense of the value of life. It is a lesson I remember any time I find myself down and depressed.

There was also the day that my father and I didn’t quite blow ourselves up while messing around with dynamite…

3

An older relevant thread:
What was one of the roads in life you chose not to travel?

4

That was a good thread, Dropzone is a good writer!

5

Really not stupid at all. I thought that was very phlosophical. Don’t let anything be wasted, even a crooked pis.

6

Reading Titan by John Varley. For some reason, it got me started writing SF.

7

I was a slacker in West Texas with a dead-end convenience-store job. Then I read The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham. It gave me the gumption to go to college seven years out of high school, which I’d dropped out of, and get out into the world and spend most of my adult life in Thailand.

8

This day

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=329548&highlight=Fired

9

About six years ago, my organization launched this huge high-profile project focused on a subject I knew very well, since it was a part of my job duties. But during the first few years of the project, I was not involved in anything. I was not invited to any meetings. No one consulted me for advice. No one shared any of the initial findings with me. I don’t think it was malicious neglect, but it did kind of piss me off. However, I didn’t say anything to anyone.

About four years into the project, my boss decided to finally rope me in. And after attending a couple of meetings, I realized that the project wasn’t being managed ideally. For one thing, I realized right away that the contractor we’d hired to run things didn’t have a clue about data analysis. His cluelessness was the subject of this thread. In any other context, such ignorance wouldn’t have been that big of a deal. But as I said, we’re talking about a high-profile project–one that is scrutinized by all levels of government and every environmental law firm in the state. You can show your ass to a scientific peer review and only embarrass yourself. But in the regulatory realm, you can’t just hand in shit and expect people to go along with it without a fight.

So I suspected early on we were going to be handled a pile of shit. But I didn’t say anything because I had just been brought into the inner circle. I didn’t want to blow it by being the angry bitch.

So I decided to be patient. I gave honest feedback to the contractor whenever he gave us a status update, and I let him know where the weak points were so that he could try to fix them. And I did all of this as cheerfully as I could muster, despite being ticked off that he was making so much money from us. He’d just ignore my comments. I kept thinking that maybe if I hadn’t been excluded at the start, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess. Maybe he wouldn’t be so quick to ignore me because he would recognize my role in the organization. At any time, the guy could have reached out to a statistician. We would have assisted him with this! But nope, he wanted to do it all on his own. I thought my boss would realize that he was in over his head and do something. But nope. I guess he was in over his head too.

So we get the final report from the contractor. It’s garbage. My boss knows it. His boss knows it. But because so much money has been invested in this report, we go with it. We present it to the stakeholders. They hate it too. We let a scientific peer review panel look at it. They hate it even more.

I don’t know how my boss was feeling because he’s the strong silent type. But me? I was boiling. When I “boil”, I get to work.

For three weeks, I devoted every brain cell to the datasets we’d collected under the project. I worked continuously, secretively. I wrote up my results (50 pages worth) and put them on my boss’s desk, where they sat for a month. Finally, with tears in my throat, I begged him to READ THE DAMN REPORT. And he did. That same week, he sent out my report to be considered by all the stakeholders as the agency’s regulatory proposal. The positive feedback we immediately received from all sectors (advocacy, regulated community, Feds) wiped away all the bad feelings we’d been suffering from over the past year.

The whole thing has taught me a lot. Like, as painful as it was to receive the shoddy work from the contractor, I know now it was smart that I bit my tongue the way I did. Yeah, I could have raised more of a fuss, but it probably wouldn’t have done anything but get me kicked off the team. And let’s say I had been able to fire him. We probably would have hired someone else to replace him. They probably would have done a better job than original guy. But they also may have had their own problems.

Big picture-wise, the whole experience has helped me to shake off any doubts about my abilities as a scientist. I had niggling doubts about my competency after I graduated 13 years ago. My post-doc only entrenched them. I think I had convinced myself that I wasn’t a “real scientist” since I wasn’t working as anyone’s professor, running my own lab, and corralling grad students. But I don’t know about all that any more. I may not be out there collecting data. But I certainly know how to argue with data. I know how to stand up in front of a room full of both lawyers and scientists and have both sides nodding their heads. I may stammer and mispronounce some words. I twitch sometimes. But the old voices telling me I’m retarded are now silent. I hope they continue to stay silent.

I got a promotion out of the whole deal, and the approach I developed may be used as a model by other environmental agencies. And unfortunately, now I’m invited to more meetings. :slight_smile:

10

Monstro, Great story!

11

Oh, and I almost forgot: I get to live in Waikiki now. That that you fucking Texas rednecks.

12

Getting divorced. Best thing that ever happpened to me.

At 39 I was forced to examine my life and ask “Am I happy with this?” and realized I wasn’t.

13

All of mine are horrifically negative, except the last one, which negates all the previous.

I remember the day I learned there is no “True Love”, “You can’t trust anybody”, “Life isn’t fair, and nobody said it would be”.

Then, one day, I realized, I’m just a number. One in billions. Billions have come and gone, billions will come and go, all mostly miserable. Hell, I have it pretty goddamn good actually. Enjoy the time I have, knowing its all meaningless. Drink a 12-pack every night, take care of a few dogs- give them a life that far surpasses anything like the countless billions that have come before, bury them and then die myself. Don’t “fight cancer”. Cancer always wins. Refuse to suffer, that’s all we can do for ourselves. Die. All forgotten to the sands of time. A thousand years from now, no one will remember me, my dogs, my wife, kids or all the shit I have piled around me.

Kind of peaceful in its own way, actually.

I just really wish someone would keep my Fiat running. It’ll never happen. But I guess I really don’t give a fuck.

14

I came in here, read the OP and instantly knew what I wanted to say. I decided to read the thread first, and when I got to the end, there was Gatopescado, saying what I was going to say, more or less.

My turning point was getting divorced. It made me realize that how I make a living and who I live with and raise a family with is only part of who I am, not the whole of it. There are so many things that only partially define us as people yet sometimes we get focused on only one or two.

Getting divorced was a painful peeling back of the layers to really, truly look at myself and who I am. Some things changed about me, some of them even by intent. The end result being that I am now comfortable “in my own skin”. Like Gato, I don’t give a fuck, anymore. The world truly is all petty, mediocre, utterly forgettable bullshit for the most part. Like Gatopescado, I am finally at peace.

15

First day of programming class, start of freshman year of college. This young guy came into the room and said something like “I’m — ---, I’m a teaching assistant which means I’m a grad student who also teaches.”

Right at that instant I knew I wanted to do that. I had never considered teaching college courses before or anything. (Despite relatives in teaching, including at the college level.) But at that instant it just clicked.

3 years later I was walking into a classroom doing the same thing.

Got my PhD, taught, did research, etc.

16

Although meeting my wife of 53 years was an important turning point, there was one place that my entire trajectory was reoriented.

In 1955, I was in the second year of working my way through college, working in a lab full time and being a part-time student, planning to major in chemistry. I had always done well in math, but it had never interested me. One evening, working late to make up for taking some course during the day, I came on two graduate students discussing this odd thing called a group. And my universe shifted. Intrigued, I asked what it was about and they explained it to me. I realized that this was not the math (analytic geometry, calculus) that I had studied but much more interesting. Fascinated, I decided to take a course in modern algebra the following year and I have been an algebraist ever since, more than 60 years later.

17

Such a cool thread, OP!

In 1977, when I was 18, I experienced a sequence of three events on the same day that I can honestly say were life-changing and life-defining. I can’t remember the date exactly but it was in May, after I had finished my first year of community college. I wanted to transfer to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and I lived in a small northern BC town with few employment prospects. My folks didnt have a lot of money, we were 5 kids, and I was broke.

Late in 1976 and into 1977 I had my first romantic relationship with Robert. We were intense but doomed. He slept with a very good friend of mine and broke up with me to be with her. He quickly realized his mistake and begged me to take him back. I agreed, stupidly. After that, I was miserable, unhappy, the works. One morning in February 1977, something made me pick up the phone and call Robert to break up with him once and for all.

So, that day in May, unemployed and not in a relationship, I get a call from Robert. He wants me back. Something in my head said a very loud NO. I it was freaky, but it felt like I was given a life or death choice. If I went back to him, awful things would happen. It was that strong. I said no, with finality, and hung up. Only a few minutes later, I got a call from the pulp mill in our town. They were hiring university students, they said. Oh, and we will guarantee you a job for every summer in which you go back to university in the fall. Oh, and we will pay you $9.79 an hour (this was in 1977).

So I had a job. For at least the next 3 years until I finished my BA. I ended up saving all the money I needed for tuition, books, residence and incidentals. Just by comparing wages in those days, by 1980, I was making $13.45 an hour at the mill with union increases, etc. Where I am living now, in Manitoba, minimum wage is $11.50 an hour.

Yes, there were three things that happened that day in May. I got another phone call, this time from my high school crush, Dean. I was so in love with him, and I figured he never knew, but he called to ask me for a date. I was over the moon. We had two dates, but never really clicked. It was sweet and a little sad.

So these three events showed me that by listening to my very strong inclination to get the hell away from Robert, my university future would unfold as it was supposed to. And sweet high school crushes might call me once in a while. But if I had stayed with Robert, I would have ended my career, probably, after being sunk in a useless relationship.

Robert ended up marrying that very good friend of mine. I told a mutual friend, in 1982, that Robert and his wife would not last. I guess I was being petty and vengeful. But I heard through the years that Robert was the kind of man who liked to have many, many sexual partners. He told his wife about all of his encounters, so it wasnt cheating, apparently.

I didn’t care much, except I knew that I had dodged a very real bullet. It would have killed me to be with Robert. I could not live with someone who had to have so many partners. BTW, Robert’s marriage ended in 2008. I learned through mutual friends on FB. He HAD contacted me again, in 2005, asking to see me. He was going to travel to my city for a conference. I said no, politely. He hasn’t tried contacting me since.

I married hubby in 1986 and we are still together. I got my masters degree in the same program as my husband was taking, which was where we met. So I think I made the right choices in 1977 and the universe took care of the rest.

18

Um, couldn’t you just stop urinating and sit down or somehow get closer to the bowl rather than pissing all over the floor?

19

I wouldn’t call this a moment where I “really liked myself” or was in some sort of “natural high”, but when I think of a defining moment in my life, I think of the time my parents decided to move all of us from my childhood home to their current home on a lake.

I was in 3rd grade (9 years old) and had already started the school year. I came home from school and was ready to tell my parents the great news that our class was going to put on a school play. When I got home, my mom told me that we were moving to a new house. I was upset, partly because I was not going to be able to be in the play, but mostly because I was moving in the middle of the school year to a completely different school district and would miss all my friends.

So we moved and began life living on the lake. We loved it! My parents got a boat and we learned to water ski. In the winter we would go ice skating. I managed to keep in touch with a couple of my old friends, but I made some new friends who have been lifelong friends ever since.

So now I look at that time and realize that the “Move” was the moment I stopped being a young child. It was the event that made me start growing up more. It is also the event that I think makes it easier to remember my young childhood. I remember things about my old house and the neighborhood I lived in that most people would forget because of this event.

So at the time, I wasn’t very thrilled about it, but looking back, it is one defining moment in my life that helped make me who I am today, so I cannot complain.

20

What? And miss the defining moment of life? That sounds like a Monty Python sketch.