Mine was the decision to get married.
I was young, had no job and was coerced into it by a relative I could not say no to.
I lost all faith in people after that : )
I wasn’t super young at the time (29), but moving from Bristol, TN to Brooklyn caused a big turnaround. I went from never getting past a first date to being married in less than 3 years. If I hadn’t moved I’m pretty sure I’d be single and bitter.
Enlisting in the Air Force right after high school at age 17. Served 8 years.
Not reenlisting for a third enlistment really changed my life in '88 (I was 25). I had planned on being a “lifer,” but if I reenlisted I was practically guaranteed to spend the next four years at a base that I hated.
So with two days left until my scheduled reenlistment date, I said fuck it, and and told 'em I was getting out.
And I returned to Syracuse. Found a good job and all, and I love it.
But–I still wonder how my life would have turned out had I stayed in the Air Force and not gotten out.
That sure is pleasant to hear 
Deciding to take a creative writing class when I was 29. Not so much for the writing (though it helped), but because I met my wife there.
From the thread title, I thought you meant young in the sense of childhood.
In that spirit, I went nonviolent in third grade. I decided adults (and girls) would respect me more if I refused to get into fights, because it was regarded as an immature behavior. Adults would justify saying that kids weren’t mature enough to control our impulses and all that. Girls would say boys were disruptive and could not comport themselves like good proto-citizens.
Boys that age don’t do much damage, so it’s actually pretty easy to just not fight back. And they get all flummoxed and bewildered and they switch to taunting and verbal baiting, trying to make you angry so you’ll fight, instead of just hitting and hitting when you don’t hit back.
Going back to school after dropping out for a year from the huge state university. I partied hard my freshman year with nothing to show for it but friends and definitly did not want to go back home to Hicksville to work in a factory. So I stayed in the big city and worked for a year while living with my new friends, then started taking classes again at a local private college at my own pace and not some set cookie cutter program pace.
Changed my life for the better to realize that one did not have to be a cog in the meat grinder state school to be successful. And I made new friends who started school later in life and were able to explain to me how the real world worked. Something you didn’t get from the big school full of 18-21 year olds.
Going to see Corey Harris perform at Moondog’s in Blawnox. I’d seen him play at several different venues during that tour, so I wasn’t going to go that night, but for some reason I did.
I was standing at one end of the bar and saw a woman I was instantly attracted to. I got the bartender’s attention and asked her if she’d ask the woman if she’d accept a drink from me. She looked over and smiled a huge smile. Turns out this was her first night out since her husband moved out and she was flattered.
She invited me to sit down with her. Then when Corey took the stage he gave me a nod (we were friends) and that really impressed her. That was 18(?) years ago and we are still together. What a night!
Moving three states over to move into my then-fiancee’s home. It didn’t work out but I learned a lot about life and myself, and on balance, although it seemed like a disaster and a failure on so many levels at the time, I don’t regret the experience.
Wow.
That is right out of a rom com
I’ve had that happen but never got me anywhere : (
Non-confrontational is what I was and what I still am.
I could never decide whether it was good or bad.
It’s close between:
- joining a chess club aged 13 led me to a career in chess playing, teaching and organising
- starting a roleplaying group in 1979* (there are still three of us originals playing 1st edition 42 years later!)
*aged 26 - does that count as young?!
I was an extremely shy and introverted child, a big part of that was because I was afraid of doing or saying something that would end up with me being embarrassed or laughed at. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than being embarrassed in front of people, so I chose to be invisible instead. But it was lonely. When I was 13 we moved to a new town and a new school.
I decided to be a different person.
I reminded myself how I admired and envied people who were outgoing, people who weren’t afraid to be a little silly, people who walked into a room and just started chatting with strangers. So I forced myself to do it, too. I was acting out a character, pretending to be who I wished to be, until eventually I wasn’t acting anymore. I WAS the person who walked into a crowd of strangers and introduced myself. It wasn’t easy, but no one laughed and pointed the way I always feared they might. Today, if I trip and fall flat on my ass in front of you I’m likely to laugh and offer to teach you my awesome secret yoga moves rather than be embarrassed. It changed my whole life.
(Some friends later told me they admired and envied me for my outgoing personality! What a change from earlier years, when people called me Mouse behind my back because I was so quiet and stayed in the background.)
Moving to the Bay Area for graduate school almost 40 years ago. I had been living in Los Angeles for a while. Since that move I’ve been continuously in the Bay Area. All my other life events — my career as a programmer, my marriage — all come from that.
Oh, got another one: Deciding to attend a fundraiser for my local public library. I met my future wife there.
In grade school and the first year and a half of HS Iived in fear of everybody. I was always the kid that was picked on.
Then I stood up (literally) to a bigger kid and he backed down.
I said, hey! I don’t have to live in fear. Really made a difference in the rest of my life.
does it just have to be one? There are several in my life. The earliest that I can pin point is moving out at 17 with no job and just the clothes I was wearing. I was an ignorant little shit, my parents figured I’d be back by the end of the week. Got a job in a lumber yard right away, Made it amost a year before my landlord sold the house. Nobody wants to rent to a single 18 year old it seems like.
Tiny thing with a huge impact. In September 1969 I was standing in line to get my room assignment in Burton House, the most rundown MIT dorm at the time. Two people came and wanted to trade their assignment to Baker House, the best dorm, for Burton. It seemed too good to be true. Only one person bit when I decided to give it a try.
It turned out to be legit, I went to Baker, and lived with a fantastic bunch of people I’m still in contact with. More importantly, it led directly to me meeting my wife 2 1/2 years later.
Seventeen, just graduated from HS, no money for college and no scholarships (loans weren’t a thing in 1954). I had a vague idea that I would get a summer job and somehow scrape together enough money for a year at Drexel, while living at home and then enter their coop program where you could earn enough to continue. I answered an ad in the paper for a lab assistant. Went for an interview. It was a lab at Penn and they explained that this was no a summer job, but an entire program where you worked full time at the lab and took classes part-time, paying only half the tuition as a full-time employee. The idea was that you took 9 credits each full term and 3 for each summer term, thus 24 over the year and after 5 years graduate with 120 credits. It changed my life. I often speculate what my life would have been had I not seen that ad.
There’s a lot of complicated background, but a friend of mine went off the rails and she and a bunch of her friends were kicked out of the house her parents had bought for her to live in. When they left, they left behind a mama dog and her day-old puppies. The friend’s mom messaged me and asked me if I wanted to come see the puppies.
Of course I did. I mean… puppies! But when I got there, the dog had clearly been locked in that room with insufficient food and no access to the outside for quite some time. She was skin and bone and the room was filled with her waste. My friend’s mom was in over her head and wasn’t prepared to take care of her or her babies.
So I said I would do it. How could I not? And that sweet , smart dog and her eight puppies became the first of hundreds of fosters. Rescue became my actual job. Pretty much everything in my life would have been different if it hadn’t been for that dog.