o/~ one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small... o/~

[kuangning]

There's a slim strip of consciousness that lies in the no-man's-land between daydreams and deeper fantasies. It's the place in your mind that twists reality slightly and hands it back to you with the edges obscured and the colours brightened, running into each other and making your eyes ache to look at them.

It's the space in which what might have been comes clear, and the afterimages of our otherselves walking away from us down other roads hover at the edges of our sight. That brand of wistfulness seems to have caught and held some of the folks on my friends list lately, and I am an edgy, restless, inquisitive Cairsten tonight.

So tell me your might have been. Tell me about the road you could have walked, the one you did walk, and the differences between the two. Tell me about the time you had to choose, and how it changed you. Tell me what you gained from it, what you lost. And then... tell me if you think it was worth it.

Comments

[heronblue.livejournal.com]

My might-have-beens never walked away... they follow me around and I keep catching glimpses of them out of the corners of my eyes. I'm no longer even sure which one is the road I took.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

College. I could have gone to the UW or Case Western, and instead I chose Oberlin.

If I'd taken Case . . . there's a larger chance I'd have a girlfriend. I'd probably be doing better in school. Minus those two, I probably wouldn't be as happy . . . including those two . . . who knows.

If I'd taken the UW . . . I might not have made as many new friends since I would have had the gang to fall back on. I might or might not be happier . . . much vaguer. I'd have a larger chance of having gotten lost. I may have been more frustrated with my mom, since she'd be too nearby :P

I might still be with Naomi.

In either case, I wouldn't have met the friends I have, but I might have met different equivalent people. Obviously I wouldn't want to give up my current friends :P but I can't say it would necessarily be worse.

was it worth it?

I don't know. Too much chaos. Tell me how my life would be different - in detail - and I'll tell you if this choice was worth it.

[kenhighcountry.livejournal.com]

There are no might have beens.
We can't ever know what they really were.
There is only the fantasy of what we think might have been.
There have been hundreds of forks in the road, and at each fork, a choice. Having chosen, there is no returning. We can look back and see where we once were. All the rest is a dream.
I know this doesn't answer your question, but looking back from the age I am now, this is what I see. There is no what if? There is only the this is, and this was.

[tatterdemalion.livejournal.com]

a couple of thing spring to mind, first one, I decided to move to be with the person who eventually became my husband, I nearly didn't go.

second decision, my husband talked me into having a 2nd child, i didnt really want to, but he really wanted one.

third... if Dan had decided to stick around.

as for how things would have turned out, well I dunno..

better, worse... dfferent.

[i.livejournal.com]

i have so many might-have-beens i wouldn't know where to begin. i try really hard not to second guess myself. we can't change the past, only the future.

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

Mine aren't really wistful lost things, just paths I did not choose.

I came here to college, out of all the places I could have gone.

In so doing, I lost someone I could have loved, who was tender and gentle and sane. Who was good and Christian and earnest.

Instead I found confusion. I learned about depression. I became a slut, in tho most positive, affirming way. I found love, and then love upon love

I think of sex differently than my mother.

I could have stayed close to home. I could have gone overseas.

I did not and do not think of my choices as limiting or constricting. If it was what I really wanted, I could still go overseas.

[grimhild.livejournal.com]

For me, it's grad school -- as much a matter of when to go as where. See, I applied to six places during my senior year in college, and was accepted to one. Johns Hopkins. I flew there to interview, and the place scared the living daylights out of me. Even the other applicants seemed to know a ton more about what they were doing than I. Plus, inner-city Baltimore itself was rather frightening.

After high school, I was ready to move on. I wanted to remake myself and find a completely new circle of friends, and so I did. By the end of college, though, I really liked who I'd become (and hope I am now a year later), and I had found a truly fantastic group of friends.

Hopkins was my only choice for grad school in the fall of 2001. It's an extremely prestigious place, and is back on the East Coast, where I have roots. I do so miss the fireflies. But it would mean being thousands of miles away from the peer group that I've come to love. It was a bloody hard choice, seeing as I've known of my desire to be a scientist since I was knee-high to a duck. But I deferred a year with no obligation, applied again last fall, and now (in case you didn't pick it up from my rants and rambles), I'm going to Berkeley this August.

And here I am in Portland, OR, still in the job that I took to make me look better for the grad schools, and staying close to my West Coast friends.

Those are the facts. But what does it mean to me? Was it worth it? Well, it's basically a matter of who I want to become. I'm sure I could be happy shooting like a rocket toward mh Ph.D. at Hopkins right now. And I'd be closer to family. But I'd have sacrificed a lot of my perception on how to handle friendships, on what they can be. Here and now, I've gained confidence in my ability to determine my own future, as opposed to the railroading of the academic system. A lot of folks just go to grad school because it's the path of least resistance, so to speak. There might still be a bit of that in me. On the other hand, seeing how much I dislike my job, I've lost the absolute conviction that doing science as a Ph.D. is definitely for me. A big change in my attitude here is that now if it seems that I'll get a fine job in a place where I'd want to work (close to my friends) with a terminal Master's degree, I'll go ahead and (smugly, complacently, happily) settle for that. If slogging through five and a half years seems too much for me, then I'll stop and say, "oh, well." And finally, I've gained the friendship of an amazing Reedie (read: one who goes to Reed College) and have firmed the bond of friendship with another fantastic Reedie (whom I've known since fourth grade) here.

In terms of ballsy academic potential, this decision probably wasn't worth it. I'm sure I have a much smaller chance of gaining any Nobel Prize now, mostly because I now more than ever refuse to allow science and academics to eat up my life. Oh, well. In terms of my ability to relate to people, I think it was worth it. Loyalty and confidence that I can have an impact of my friend-circle-environment are the big things that made it so. It is, however, possible that I have sacrificed some of my ability to jump into a completely new atmosphere. Well, we'll see how my post doc goes if I do one, but otherwise I intend never to make that kind of jump again. Thus, if all goes decently well, I'll not miss the loss.

[baxil.livejournal.com]

The difficulty in finding a "might have been" is to find a crossroads -- a place where, if one decision had not been made, the decision that would have been made in its absence is a very clear one.

The one that springs to mind for me? In early 1999, when elynne and I were beginning to think of each other as more than friends ... and we talked about the future ... it came out she was married.

There was a single moment that changed my life, then: I happened to listen to one of my CDs, where Annwn covered David Crosby's "Triad." About someone trying to choose between two partners, and suggesting, "Why don't we go on as three?" It got my mind working, and I made the suggestion, and ultimately it was the right time and place for it, and things fell together -- and I moved to Seattle, and here we still are.

Without that one moment, without that one critical decision ... I would have resigned myself to yet another episode of unrequited love, drifted away from her ... and stayed in California. The household I was living in, in Dublin, would have fallen apart (as it did anyway), and I would have stayed at my job at the newspaper. I might have tried to find some other friends to room with, but I'd been pretty badly burned (I left Dublin with three of my roommates in debt to me by over $2000 apiece). I might have moved home with the parents again.

Beyond that, it's all speculation. But it's likely that I'd be single; I'd be far less socially balanced and far more isolated; I'd be less happy; I'd be employed (at a job I disliked -- I'd probably still be at ANG); and I'd be taking a much more active role as a BayCon staff member, because I'd be in the area.

With that alternative -- hell, yes, it was worth it.