What was one of the roads in life you chose not to travel?

[Snickers]

I’m a technical writer, and I like it well enough. Pays the bills, and I’m good at it. However…

A few years back, my mom got into a car accident. She was healing up well, but there was something with the wound on her finger that was bothering her. My dad’s a doctor, but was unavailable for some reason - I think Mom was at my house while Dad was still at home, 100 miles away, for whatever reason. Anyway, she asked me if I’d help her clean the wound a bit, maybe trim away some dead skin, that sort of thing. I’m not all that squeamish, and said sure.

I’ve always been a bit jealous of people that love their jobs, that can’t imagine doing anything else. Like I said, I like what I do, but it’s a job. Not a calling. I’ve always been slightly mystified by people who have a “calling,” and wonder what it’d be like to be one of them. I’m good at what I do, but how much better would I be at something I love?

While working on my mom’s finger, it was like being whapped with a giant clue-by-four. “This, Snicks, ***this ***is what you should be doing with your life” said the voice in my head. So I enrolled in a local college that offers a BSN program for people who already have bachelor’s, with night classes and such. And although I was accepted, I had a lot of prereqs to clear before getting into the actual nursing courses. I started with two classes, Anatomy & Physiology 1 and an ethics course (I think).

I lasted about a quarter.

Honestly, it was too much: when I wasn’t working, I was studying. When I wasn’t studying, I was sleeping. When I wasn’t sleeping, I was working. Two days a week I’d leave work and go directly to class, then get home at 9:30 and go to bed. The other three days I studied, with more studying on the weekend. I never saw my husband, and was getting frazzled from all the stress. (Even though he told me that I just needed to pass; I didn’t need to pass with flying colors. Hard advice to take for someone who’d always been a straight-A student.)

I’ve always kind of regretted withdrawing. Nursing is known as a profession that eats its young, so maybe I wouldn’t have loved it so much after actually getting there. But maybe I would’ve, and maybe that’s really the profession for me. And it’s so easy now to make excuses: I don’t have the time, I can’t afford to leave my job, I’m working my job as additional support for my husband who’s started his own business, I’d have even more prereqs now than I had then… On and on.

But still…I wonder.

[nearwildheaven]

@TokyoBayer

I’m too busy regretting what I do today to look back at yesterdays.

Maybe the one road I do revisit from time to time is when my father was beating up my mother and sisters in the other room. I was just a kid, maybe 12, maybe 10. It’s been too long and I don’t remember exactly.

I was washing dishes. I was in the kitchen and they were in the dining room. We had a “pass-through” an opening above the sink for the dishes and food. Dad and his victims were out of sight, but from the pass-through, I could here them quite clearly.

First, my father beat up my mother. She was screaming, and my sisters were crying as well. Then he beat up one sister and then the other. Maybe went back and forth a couple of times. You could tell who was getting the shit beaten out of them by the screams.

You hear about the “fight or flight” reflex, but there is also the freeze. You simply turn off the emotions and go into auto. Any kind of response could have brought the terror on you. So I continued washing the dishes, one by one. The cups and the bowls.

Then, as I got down to the bottom of the sink, there were the knives. Several of them. Large, kitchen knives. I picked one up to wash it and found my fist clamped on the handle. It would not let go.

My little boy’s mind tried to calculate what would happen if I didn’t wash that knife in water, but gave it a bath in blood.

Somehow I knew it was helpless, that it wouldn’t work. But would it? It sounded like my father’s back was turned. Could I? I wanted to. I wanted to end that hell and save my family.

I don’t remember what happened next. I guess that my resolve failed. I’ve always been a coward, and it took another 10 years before I stood up to that monster. Looking back, the chance of success would have been nil. A little boy, not even in junior high against an enraged grown man? Not even a knife would have helped.

But still. This would have been at the end of the 60s or early 70s, and there wasn’t outside help. My mother never tried to extract her and us from there. Could that have worked? Probably not, but it couldn’t have made things any worse. They were as bad as it gets.

Maybe, just maybe my father could have been wounded. Any maybe that would have shocked someone into looking at the situation and gotten us out of there. This was about the time my mother was severely depressed, zoned out on Prozak and attempting suicide…

Maybe my younger brother wouldn’t have been driven into insanity nor my second sister gone batty. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to fight so many demons, trying to silence them with wine and anonymous women.

Or maybe not. More likely, it would have just pissed off my father and he would have beat me up as well. But what was one more time?

I don’t worry too much about it. When the state, the church and the extended family all turn their back, there really wasn’t anything which I, a little kid, could have done.

Sometimes, though, I think back, what would have happened? But I don’t think about it too much. That doesn’t help me now.

When I was a teenager, I considered doing the same thing to my mother, for kicking my 12-year-old brother in the stomach for the mortal sin of sitting too close to the television. She would do this on an almost daily basis, and also told us that she would kill us if we told anybody. I tried to tell my dad, and he said, “Your brother misbehaves and needs to be punished.” But not like that! And there was NO WAY anyone else would have believed me.

Whenever we have family gatherings, she sits there and tells one bald-faced lie after another. After she’s gone, her grandchildren are going to learn the truth.

He got into a lot of trouble as a teenager. And I know why.

[PastTense]

I just realized that the “road not taken” came from a poem written by Robert Frost:

The Road Not Taken

[Sunspace]

@Osiris_the_1st

Angee, was my most persistant crush through middle and high school. We were friends, but I never had the guts to try and take it further than that. I wish I hadn’t let fear of rejection dominate my life for so long.

Ditto, except her name was Kathy and I didn’t meet her until grade 10.

However, in grade 8, there was this girl named Angela who asked me out. I declined; I thought she was making fun of me. I had no other social referent.

My life has been ruled by feelings of unworthiness. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like without that continual mental tone to things. Even with all my other problems remaining, I might have noticed opportunities I didn’t in real life. I might have tried opportunities that I noticed in real life and never took. I might have asked that girl in university out. I might have gone to a different school. I might have listened more closely to my creative heart.

What is certain is that I have achieved maybe 10 percent of what I could have…

[Kiros]

I took the LSAT in my senior year of college. Got a 177 (max is 180; anything above 170 is extremely high, with how the ‘curve’ works; a 177 is basically a free pass into any program you want, if your undergrad grades are fine and you can write essays legibly, at least in the time period that I was looking at things). A suitably naive and young part of me wanted to be Josh Lyman when I grew up. I ended up deciding that I wanted to spend a couple of years working first - the exam result is good for five years and I really didn’t want to be one of those people who does school straight though, you know?

Well, I ended up getting a non-law-related job that I didn’t totally hate, and after six years of advancing that I’m in a full-time MBA program. Some part of me thinks I’d have been happier going through law school, and a more practical part of me is happy that I dodged graduating into one of the worst legal job environments in the history of ever. Either way, it’s an interesting what-if.

[DChord568]

I graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication (RTV major) in 1973 from a school with one of the best programs of its kind in the country.

Many of the graduates from this program went on to immediately pursue distinguished careers in broadcasting at the network and big-market levels. I was probably smart enough and good enough to do that.

But instead, I came back to my hometown, where I already had friends and connections in local radio, and worked at a succession of small stations over the next 15 or so years.

I made very little money and endured management at some stations that bordered on insanity. Still, I made more great friends in the business, laughed liked hell with them, and experienced only a fraction of the pressure I would have had I gone the big-market route.

And then luckily, I got out of broadcasting and into another field, just as the specter of corporate ownership of most radio stations was rearing its head. (This, of course, would prove to be the absolute ruination of a once great medium.)

Meanwhile, I was able to engage in my true love, playing guitar in rock and country bands, as a sideline (and I’m still doing that to this day).

I wouldn’t trade the memories from either my vocation or avocation for anything in the world.

All things considered, I believe I took the right road in life. I might have a lot more money in my pocket today if I had taken the other one. But at what cost?

[Truman_Burbank]

So, there I was, a year or two out of my BA in Psych, working as a psychiatric aide for low wages in a mental health facility, pretty much a snakepit (but boy, do I got stories…). I was finally dating a girl I’d had a mad crush on in HS, after her divorce, and it was going…OK. I think the fact that she’d made such a big commitment to a man who wasn’t me sorta let me think she was picking me up off the ‘remainders bin’.
Now, I love Literature, and working the snakepit wasn’t a career, so it was getting to be time for a next move career-wise, and she got me an interview at the private Catholic HS where she taught, and the nuns eventually offered me a job teaching. Starting out teaching grammar, and diagramming sentences with the Frosh, and extra hours expected proctoring dances, football games, and the like. I am not, BTW, any kind of religious, much less Catholic, but they didn’t seem to care. As long as I would take the job, for a princely $900/month as I recall, and try to find a way to make that last a month in the West LA area. So, I turned it down, and got a Master’s in Psych instead, and became a therapist, which I love.
But I still wonder if I’d taken the job, and worked on a Master’s in Education instead, if I’d be a happy English teacher somewhere teaching (by now) AP American Lit and discussing To Kill A Mockingbird with bright young students. I could have liked that a life a lot, too, I think.

[the_diego]

Chose not to enter the military academy, something my dad and I were talking about since I was in sixth grade. First time I took the test I was sent out allegedly for cheating. The officer assured me I could re-apply the following year with no biases against me. Forget it.

[elmwood]

When I got out of grad school, I was being recruited to join the PhD program in my field at another university. I just wanted to get back into the real world, though, rather than spend several more years in school. Also, a PhD in my field would limit my job prospects to academia, and competition for teaching/professor positions is brutal.

[Jackmannii]

The road I chose not to travel was the Katy Freeway during rush hour.

[P-man]

I didn’t ask a lot of women out because of several rejections early on. I moved to New York in my late twenties, where I dated more than I had the previous 10-12 years in the first two years. The rejections came less immediately, or we both decided it wasn’t happening. I’m glad I didn’t make the moves earlier, though, because I met my wife at a party I almost skipped out on.

I agree with the earlier poster about how “no” is the worst that can happen, but when it happens too often early on it can wear on you. I definitely let fear of rejection dominate my life; If I could have gotten out more and still ended up with the same wife and kids, I’d change it. If that’s what had to happen to be where I am now, it was worth it.

[Soylent_Juicy]

I literally found myself at a crossroads once. I was 18 years old and living with my then-boyfriend. I won’t bore you with the details, just to say that it was hell. (Not abusive thank God, but otherwise shitty.) I was walking to a place called “Futures” which was a program at the time for people 18-25 years old that helped them with school and a job placement. I got to the corner of the street that would take me to either Futures or the hospital. I stood there on the corner looking at the hospital - I knew people who had signed themselves into the psych ward for depression or whatever, and part of me wanted to walk in there and say I was suicidal or something just to get a break from my shitty life. I stood there looking up the street at the hospital and down the street to Futures…then turned and walked down the street to Futures.

Because I couldn’t trust my then-boyfriend to look after my beloved cat for me if I chose the hospital.

Futures turned out to be a Godsend. They truly helped me.

[cmkeller]

I chose not to visit Robert Frost’s home on a trip to New Hampshire.

It was very far out of the way, and I was tired.