Personal Epiphanies

In My Humble Opinion
1

Tell me about those moments in your life when something suddenly clicked. When is that spark of comprehension hit you out of the blue? It could be life changing, or maybe it was something that you really should have realized before.

I love hearing about epiphanies. They can open up a reader’s eyes to something he or she has never even thgouht about. Not only that, but I’m trying to jog my memory. Surely, I must have had an epiphanal momnet in life. Maybe hearing yours can help me pinpoint my own.

2

I have 2. I’m not sure if the first one counts, but here goes. …

I was watching king of the hill the other day and I finally realized that Jimmy James (stephen root from News Radio) is the voice of Bill Doterive. I’m not sure if this is what is known as an epiphany but I’ve been watching the show since it’s inception and hadn’t realised it until now.

The second and most recent epiphany that I’ve had was regarding my Linear Algebra class. I bombed a midterm where the most important topics centered around "The vector Space R n. Lately, near the end of the course, we are learning about Linear Transformations and all the stuff from the beginning of the midterm just clicked.

So, as of now, I should just about be able to pass the first midterm…the only problem is, I have a final to write in two days and now there is all of the topics FROM the midterm that I don’t understand. Such is life I guess.

3

When my Mom had a brain aneurysm that ruptured. And brain surgery. The period of time after that was my “Aha Moment”. I figured out what really matters in life and more importantly, what doesn’t matter.

[sub]Hijack - How did things work out for your friend? You can e-mail me (see profile) if you’d rather answer that way. I sent you an e-mail when that was all going on. I hope everything worked out for her.[/sub]

4

Aha #1 - When I realized that my “party animal” side was just an excuse to be away from my (now ex) husband.

Aha #2 - When I realized that I had total control of my weight. I was chosing to take each and every bite of food.

5

I was just thinking of this the other night. I love these, too! Here’s one of my favourites, a serious one, though I’ll try to remember a “light” one if I can, later.

I was having a conversation with my (now-ex) boyfriend, and somehow the discussion came around to abortion/unwanted pregnancies. I was saying how I hoped I would never be in that situation, because it must be absolutely agonizing to go through. It would make it even harder if (like me) you didn’t believe in abortion and yet didn’t feel that you could keep the child. Also, how would you handle the pressures/opinions from your parents and boyfriend, say if he wanted to terminate and you didn’t?

Then (and this was the epiphany) my guy said, “What if the girl wants an abortion and the guy wants to keep the baby?” I looked at his face then, and was stunned by what I saw: the absolute love and passion in his eyes for his future children. It was amazing. These kids, that he’s never met, that he may not know their mother yet–he cares about them, he wants to protect them, he would do anything for them. It was, honestly, awe-inspiring. I know what a mom’s love for her kids is like, since I’m a woman, but this was just a little bit different, because he was (going to be) a father, not a mother. It was like I got a glimpse into his soul there. It was also a bit weird, since what he was feeling was between him and his future kids, and had nothing to do with me at all (whether they were my kids, too, or not). It was a good weird, though, and I felt honoured to get to watch it.

I never told him how that affected me–I don’t know, now, if it’ll ever come up. I wish I could tell him, though, because it was a defining moment in my life, in my learning about love. And of course, in my learning about the male species. :slight_smile:

6

When I was quite young I was in bed one night and was having trouble sleeping. There was a lot of traffic noise on our quiet street for some reason that night.
I called my dad and told him my problem with the noisy cars. He explained to me that he couldn’t go out in the street and quiet traffic.
I suddenly realized Daddy’s lilitations. Until then, I thought he could do anything.

7

When I realized why it was that I had no interest in attending any more classes & could not for the life of me come up with a thesis. I was in a Doctoral program for Philosophy, thinking I would write something really impressive about aesthetics or ethics & then go on to a glorious teaching career. At least that was the plan. But for nearly a year I had no motivation & nearly flunked out.

What I finally figured out was that I had never really had any interest in an academic career. What I wanted were answers to some basic questions and some not so basic questions. By that second year I had the answers. Not THE answers - my answers. I realized this during an overnight shift at 7-11 (oh the places we work to put ourselves through school). I have never regretted either the time getting my degrees, but I have also never regretted leaving when I did.

8

I was always an obsessed artistic kid. Yet my mom (fearing that I’d starve as an artist) was always super-discouraging of my art. Any chance she got, my mom criticised, belittled, complained about me “wasting paper”, and so on. She was relentless in her complaints and discouragment.

Fortunately my dad and my aunts were far more encouraging, but not enough to counteract my mom. Most everyone was oblivious of what she was putting me through, so it seemed.

At age 14, I’d decided I’d had enough. With a deep, soulful martyred sigh, I took all my art supplies out to the garage, as a gesture of giving art up forever. My mom happened to be in the garage too, cleaning up or something. She knew what I was doing, and didn’t care. Didn’t say anything.

My ephphany came when I realized right there that if I gave up art, no one would care. My mom would be happy that I finally succumbed to her pressure. The rest of my family would notice for a little while, but would be too absorbed in their own dramas to say much, or give a damn for long. So I was all on my own. By giving up art, I’d make no impact on anyone, and would only make my mom happy. And I’d be miserable. What was the point of that?

So I pulled all my art stuff out of the boxes, and took them all back inside. I can’t say that my mom’s campaign to get me to quit art stopped bothering me, but it was different after that. I knew that I was doing art for me. It made a huge difference.

(I can’t say that my mom has developed a “normal” motherly pride about my art now, but she has much improved. Several years ago she utterly shocked me by showing off photos of my artwork to her friends! Amazing! That was so unlike her, I thought she was possessed or ill or something!)

9

I’ve had three major epiphanies. I’ll only post the first two since they’re the positive ones; I’m in a pretty good mood tonight, for once, and I wouldn’t mind staying that way.

In highschool, I was your garden variety nerd: intelligent, scrawny frame, messy hair, and incredibly shy. Understandably, I didn’t have many friends, maybe one close school bud and three or four others I’d talk to because at least they weren’t going to make incessant fun of me. Most nights I’d stay awake wondering exactly why I didn’t seem to fit in, until one night, lying in bed, I swear I heard the precise phrase booming through the cosmos: “There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with everybody else.” Took it to heart, I did.

My second epiphany occurred this summer, at a campsite just outside of Rome, in the form of a brown-haired, bandana-wearing, five-foot-nothing girl from Sydney, Australia. I had severed ties with my girlfriend of three years about a month before leaving for Europe, and I had serious concerns that our relationship was a vast cosmic fluke, that no one will probably find me attractive again, and that I’ll die a grizzled hermit, herding llamas and alpacas alone atop a mountain in the most desolate reaches of the Andes. In the end, a 1.5 L bottle of cheap Italian wine and an girl with an empty cabin convinced me otherwise. [sub]Thanks, K.![/sub] :wink: