I stumbled across a writing prompt that asked me to look back at key moments that have shaped my life. I didn’t really think much of it at first, but as I looked back and rifled through my life memories, it became a much more moving experience than I had anticipated. My life has taken left and right turns, equally shaped, it appears, by joy and by tragedy.
Each of the following moments could have pushed me into an entirely different direction, and I sometimes wondered what person I would have been had a particular incident not happened or had I done something different in response.
The time I broke my arm
This seems like such an innocuous event. So many children go through this, being the tiny little risk monsters that they are. I think I was around 9 years old. I couldn’t find my roller skates, so I borrowed my sister’s. The skates were adjustable; flat metal bottoms that could be moved in and out to adjust to your shoe size. But, these were still way too small for me. I couldn’t quite get the straps to go all the way around my shoes. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t wait to start jumping over the heaves and dips in our backyard sidewalk.
Crash!
Crack!
One of my shoes had gotten loose, and my foot slipped from under me. I fell directly on my left arm, breaking the ulna and fracturing the radius. I spent weeks in a cast and, although it healed, I would eventually lose a certain amount of rotation ability in my left arm. I became much more cautious.
After that, I often thought of what ifs? What if I had never broken that arm? Would I have been more active and athletic? Would I have learned to play the guitar? Would I have become a concert pianist? Instead, I buried myself into books and became an avid reader with dreams of someday becoming a writer.
Getting accepted to Berkeley
All that book reading was good for something — I excelled in school and eventually achieved a greater than 4.0 GPA. I applied to and got accepted into UC Berkeley. There was a bit of trauma surrounding that acceptance. The valedictorian of our school had also applied and hadn’t gotten accepted. There were whispers about affirmative action (I was half Mexican American/half Filipino) and about people getting accepted who maybe didn’t deserve it.
Even though I swore those whispers couldn’t be about me (these people were my friends, they couldn’t be talking about me, right?), I began to question my self-worth. It didn’t matter that I had that great GPA or was in a million activities or that I had traveled the world and had experiences in places like Hawaii and Okinawa, Japan, that had broadened both my horizons and my thinking.
Of course, I still went, and I graduated with an English degree. And that degree got me my first reporting job at a B2B technology magazine. I did wonder if I would have taken harder classes or taken a different route if I hadn’t taken those whispers to heart, but I persevered and got an amazing education.
Saying yes to a friend to go to a converted brothel
The day that I met my future husband is a long and wonderful story, and there’s only room for a brief summary here. We ended up traveling to Port Costa, California, eating king crab legs at a dingy bar and drinking gin and tonics out of mason jars. We stayed at the Burlington Hotel, which was a converted brothel, with rooms named after the girls, like Peggy.
It was an amazing night filled with laughter and drinks and poker. But I almost didn’t go. A friend had invited me to hang out, and being the introvert that I was, I had originally said yes, but when he came to pick me up to go, I was seriously thinking about bailing at the very last minute. But something in me whispered, “Go,” and I did. And I met my life partner who has taken me around the world with him.
Having my daughter
Ever since I was young, I had dreams about being a writer. I would live in some dingy attic garret in Paris and type away all my thoughts and dreams into stories that the public would love. Or, I would be some struggling writer living in New York City, living with a roommate and going out to bars and nightclubs on the weekends. Never in my dreams did I think about growing up in suburbia with a white picket fence with 2.5 kids.
But, when I met my soulmate, we both decided to have a child, and it was the most natural and logical thing to do. When I had my beautiful baby girl, she was so tiny. Her foot was no bigger than my husband’s thumb. My life changed immediately, and I needed to make sure that she was cared for and loved.
As she has grown older, I have learned that she is not a mini me (nor is she a replica of my husband). She is her own person (with flashes of my husband’s laugh or of my observant self) who makes me see the world in an entirely different light. I made specific professional choices that focused on stability and less on risk-taking. But that was OK, because of this amazing new part of our family that fills our lives with laughter and joy.
Learning that my sister was dying
This milestone is such a painful one. I will write more about this long and horrific process someday when I don’t automatically break down and weep when I think about it. But I still remember the day she called me in the middle of the day. I was at work and had to find an empty office. She said, they found something. She wasn’t sure, as results of an endoscopy hadn’t been completed yet, but during the procedure, the words “adeno” and “carcinoma” had floated around in the room. She had looked it up, and it wasn’t good.
Oh, god.
And so began the most painful year and a half of my life. I can’t write more about that experience right at this moment, but her strength and grace during that time is something that imprinted on me forever. No matter what I’m going through, I know that I can get through it. And the thing that that experience changed in me forever is to always be kind to everyone. You never know what they are going through when you encounter them out in the world.
Getting laid off
And now we are to where I am now. My layoff. My frustration and anger at being laid off after 17 years at a company ebbs and flows. My company did what it felt it had to do. But watching wave after wave of layoffs at big tech companies, mostly, I think about the unfairness of multibillionaire tech CEOs destroying the lives of so many tens of thousands of people across the country just so that they can make 501 million dollars this year instead of 500 million last year. I think about people posting about going into maternity leave or their honeymoons after having been laid off. Job searches lasting for months and months.
But, I’m at a fork in the road again with this milestone. I can keep searching for full-time employment at another corporation. But, no. I have decided that I am going to be my own boss. I am going to freelance my services and work for myself. The copyediting, writing, and proofreading that I do is done on my own terms, and it feels so much better to be doing that. I feel free.
This exercise has been so moving to me. I highly recommend doing it yourself. Think back on those milestones that moved you down a different path. Every moment, whether joyous or tragic, is a moment that you can learn and grow from. For me, I am so excited to see where this next path takes me.
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