the-spot.net

On the other side of the Looking Glass, there is a thread of similar name, that was sparked as a random post by tank driver will in some other thread. The idea was to describe how you go to where you are today - what choices set your life on its particular path, and what pivotal moments in your history basically altered your future timeline from the path you originally saw for yourself.

Many people posted to the thread, but the content was all created in 2009. A lot has happened for many people since then, and I thought it'd be interesting to revisit (and in some cases recap, then continue) the stories of how people have gotten to where they are in life today.

I'll start with mine, and condense what I posted over there down into something shorter and easier to read...and pick up where it left off.

In High School, I was fairly smart at #4 in my class, and taught myself how to program calculators, learned as much math and science as I could, and realized I could teach myself anything I wanted to know. I took this with me to college where I spent my weekends studying and building websites. I eventually met a girl I knew I would marry, made many friends I knew I'd have forever, and was working on a degree in a field I was born to understand, all while at a school my family knew God wanted me.

One year into college, things got out of order. Over-confidence caused me to chose to focus on friends instead of studies, which dropped my grades. My mom and step dad pulled me out of college (I guess they decided God didn't want me to be there)...causing me to lose the friends I though I'd have forever, and the girl I knew I would marry. The parents preceded to smurf around with my life, in the name of God (documented in The Blue Journal - google it if you really want to know), costing me my job promotions, which cost me the requirements for THEIR plans for my life (moving out, going to TSTC, etc), and lead them to give me the ultimatum of "Army or your Father's".

I chose my father's, weighing a perceived "spiritual death" against the possibility of actual death (I was pretty smurfed up when I lived with them). Giving up their version of "God," I tried to get everything back on track - started back up at college with the degree in a field I was born to understand, reconnect with the friends I'd have forever, and eventually date the girl I knew I'd marry.

Then I started to make "mistakes." I made mistakes costing me the relationship with the girl I thought I'd marry. I made financial mistakes costing me the degree in a field I was born to understand, and I made spiritual mistakes distancing myself from the friends I thought I'd have forever.

I found myself in a depression that lasted from the fall of 2004 until the winter of 2014. I didn't realize I was in this depression until midnight as December 3rd, 2014 ticked on the clock. The depression got easier to deal with and easier to hide, but it was always there...until it wasn't.

<And now, the conclusion...>

During all that time...
I held many different jobs and migrated from hospitality to accounting to warehouse IT work to user support to everything in IT Administration to scaling it back to the enjoyable web application development to website development.

I also went from a little bit of debt where I forgot to pay off a credit card; to paying only the minimum payments because I couldn't afford more; to paying a full paycheck against credit cards; to running out of all cash, credit and savings, and having less than $1/day for groceries...to having my girlfriend move in to pay for food; to losing my job as IT Admin when the company folded, and finally getting a market-rate paycheck; to saving up enough to put toward a downpayment on a house and fully finance the birth of possible twins and being debt free ("unsecured debt").

I tried many different types of relationships, dating people I worked with, people I reconnected with from high school, people I knew from college, and ultimately decided it was useless to attempt to find someone I knew who was ready to have a relationship, and with me...and decided to look online and milk Match.com for all the free 6-month Guarantees I could...to finding someone toward the end of Month 5, and her moving in 6 months later (for mutual financial help) and marrying her nearly 2 years after that...someone who shares my disgrunteled views on politics and religion with similar goals for family life.

What caused my depression to end? A single apology for a single mistake I made in the fall of 2004. An apology against the reason the depression started in the first place. Oddly enough, I was the only one who remembered what happened at all in the end.

My life isn't at all what I had planned for myself: marrying that one girl, being a multimillionaire, running an "Internet Restaurant". But I am where I am, and while it'll never be perfect all the way around, I'm pretty content. Knowing what I know now, if I were to do it all over again - it's tough to say if I'd fix the mistakes I made. They got me here, but I did go through a dark time, and suffered the cost of 10 years of misplaced focus.