personal hinge points

[jazzfish]

Elseweb a friend asked about personal hinge points, of the "if you could go back and do one thing differently, what would it be?" variety.

Most of the poor decisions I've made were the best decision I could have made at the time. As noted elsewhere, I lacked the tools to make better ones. To have chosen differently or better I would have had to be a different person. This rules out such obvious choices as "don't nearly fail out of college" or "don't give up on writing for the better part of a decade."

Having said that, there are one or two places things could have gone differently.

---

Freshman year of high school was a revelation. I didn't know how to handle not being the brightest guy around anymore. I solved that by staying out of things that put me in direct competition with other people who (I thought) were already ahead of me. If I'd been a bit more sure of myself, or better-adjusted, I would have taken AP Computer Science; as it was, I signed up for CS For (Relative) Dummies.

For a good many years, whenever I thought about "the one thing I could go back and do differently," that came up. So let's game that out.

I take AP CS instead of CS For Dummies. This propels me onto a computer-science track instead of electrical engineering. Most of my social experience in high school remains the same[1], which means I'm still broken in the same ways by the time I graduate. It also means I still go to Virginia Tech; I'm just in the computer science department instead of engineering. I keep the same social circles, since they're all people I knew or knew of from high school. I still end up with uilos. I'm pretty sure I still make the Dean's Other List in 1996 and take the Dean's Vacation in 1997, which means I still break with my parents in summer 1997.

[1] One butterfly-wing difference: I'm not in a CS class with Tony A--, which likely means he never joins Shakespeare Troupe, thereby saving one of my best friends from an awkward decade-plus relationship. Small favors.

The only open question is whether I switch to English. If so, the only change is that I have years of C/C++ experience going to waste instead of years of electronics knowledge. This makes me a better software tester, but I still hate testing and I'd still rather be a tech writer. I still take the current job at $COMPANY in DC and the last six years play out mostly as written. No shift, except in imperceptible background details.

On the other hand, if I stick with CS, then I eventually claw my way out of school with a CS bachelor's degree and go looking for programming work. There's a good chance that I end up in Seattle instead of DC in summer 2006 this way. On that trajectory, uilos breaks up with me immediately, and after two years my awful ex spends a couple of years further north. Since I'm still invested in going to Vancouver, she still breaks up with me pretty soon after returning to Seattle in 2010, and I'm in Seattle, a lonely, bitter, and broken man. Only I haven't had the kick in the pants necessary to get counseling, so I'm even more miserable than I might otherwise be, if not dead.

Or I find programming work in DC in summer 2006 instead. That's the same path as now with a different workplace, one that won't send me to Vancouver. Which means that events in 2009 and 2010 play out slightly differently, and right now I'm in my own place in Seattle or B'ham, and my awful not-an-ex-in-this-timestream is passively aggressing at me to stay in Seattle instead of emigrating, and uilos may or not still be speaking to me. Since my ultimate goal is still Vancouver, my awful ex will break up with me in a year or two when that gets close enough that she can't ignore it. And then... I'm in Seattle with no friends other than hers. Which is like being in Vancouver with no friends, except it's not where I've been wanting to be for seven years and there's no uilos. Again with the "lonely, bitter, and broken."

The very best of those outcomes is "like now, slightly different." Not worth the chance.

---

There are other hinges. I could have identified as poly in spring 2003 instead of rejecting it out of hand because all the poly people I knew were immature drama-prone twits. The best-case scenario there is that it saves the uilos/awful-ex friendship, and kicks the jazzfish/uilos problems down the road a year or two. And said problems are infinitely worse when they finally boil over. I don't know what happens then. It seems likely that, like a twit, I'd join the ranks of the immature and drama-prone. Cut to early-college acquaintances chanting "One Of Us! One Of Us!" and scene.

I could have asked my parents for money to pay for counseling in January 2004 after Those Pigfuckers (formerly "Anthem") chose not to cover it. I'd likely stay broken up with uilos, which might drive her to counseling. I'd still go to DC in summer 2006 if not before. If I hadn't broken up with my awful ex before the crap from that summer I certainly would then. There's a chance that uilos and I would reconnect, in which case it's like now only somewhat better. Otherwise... being single and less-poorly-adjusted five years ago leads to either "Vancouver, alone" or "DC, with someone," and neither of those are very good options. I suppose I might meet someone else who wants to move to Vancouver as well but that seems like a stretch.

Or I could have just broken up with my awful ex in summer 2006, when I was first getting treated like shit. Without her forcing problems to boil over, uilos and I still go to counseling, it's just a year or two later. On the other hand, there's less junk in my head for me to sort through, so I start making progress much sooner. Writing and Vancouver still happen on roughly the same timescale. And since I'm still a shy straight guy who's already in a relationship, my main experiences with polyamory and kink remain theoretical. Little change, but what there is is for the good.

Of them all, that one's the most promising. It has only two issues. First, it's heavily dependent on the "we still go to counseling" track; without that, everything is much, much worse. Second, I don't know that I could have broken up with her at that point. If I'd had the local support network in place that I had even a year later, sure: but right then, the only people I knew to talk to were the people I was dating. Which didn't help anything.

---

There are a number of things I don't like about my life, but for the most part it's where it needs to be right now. And the good things (uilos, Vancouver, writing, being somewhat less broken) aren't worth giving up for a chance at something unknown-but-maybe-better.

Like the man says, I can't complain but sometimes I still do.

Comments

Steph again

[(Anonymous)]

I have one hinge point that comes to mind - the details of which I will spare the comments track. The decision centers around "stay - or run," and the events of the summer of 2005 might have turned out very differently. But if I had never been assaulted, my relationship with A might never have fallen apart, and I wouldn't be where I am now - happy, engaged, financially secure, and looking forward to a life with a man I love more than breathing. So I'm not too upset about the whole thing, really.

Re: Steph again

[jazzfish]

Despite how you got there, that is a pretty rockin outcome.

[rbandrews]

I was going to type out a whole thing about how most of this seems to be predicated on the idea that the same things would happen to you as a CS major as did with an EE major. I think instead of trying to talk about the awesome opportunities my CS degree has granted me, I'll talk about why I can't really do the same thing you did here:

The thing is, when I look back at the most influential moments of my life, it's stuff like "deciding at the last minute to visit Kevin because I needed a weekend away, and thus meeting Cassie" or "complaining to Bassel about my job on exactly the right morning and thus moving back to Houston to be a manager".

So it's stuff like this: I happened to be booted into Linux when the RA came by my first weekend in the dorms to check that I was able to connect to the network, so he mentioned that there was a Linux User Group at VT, so I went to a meeting, so I went to the student organization showcase, where the LUG hadn't actually gotten a booth, so I wandered around before heading back, so I met two people playing Go, who became my first and most lasting two friends in college.

If I went back in time and decided to major in computer engineering instead, would the same thing have happened? Maybe. Probably not. But I can't say "this would have changed this way" even in hindsight, because so much of the stuff that's shaped my life (I'd say probably the top five life-changing moments for me at least) were totally random chance.

[jazzfish]

most of this seems to be predicated on the idea that the same things would happen to you as a CS major as did with an EE major.

That's true. There are a couple of reasons for that:

1) Very little of what happened to me as an EE/CpE major had any effect on my life, and only slightly more of what's happened to me as an English major has had any effect either. I would have gone for an English minor regardless, which means still taking the courses that interested me: F/SF, Le Guin, Modern Poetry. The vast majority of the things that happened to me at college were in spite of the what I ostensibly went there to learn, not because of it.

2) Honestly it seems most likely to me that I'd transfer out of CS into English, same as I did with engineering. English was a way for me to get through college while doing the minimum necessary work, because papers came easily but problem sets or whatever CS calls its equivalents (projects, I guess) are neverending and eternal. It might not be as quickly, but it would most likely happen. (If it was too late and the English department wouldn't have me, then I guess I'd join Adam and Patrick in the "dropped out of college, never left B'burg" brigade. No thank you.)

3) The kinds of things you seem to be thinking of are awesome, and they're also wholly unpredictable butterfly-wing things. For instance: I hung out a lot on rec.games.int-fiction and rec.arts.int-fiction my freshman year. If I'd already known how to code, it's not outside the realm of possibility that I would have started trying to write games in Inform then, and maybe become one of the early IF-renaissance pioneers, instead of playing through Hexen for the fourth time. That'd be cool-- but it's pretty unlikely, and I can't plan out anything based on the exceedingly unlikely.

I guess the upshot is, "My life doesn't suck, and there's no likely outcome that's substantially better, so I'm not willing to roll the dice on it again."

[rbandrews]

I'm just saying, for my life, it's all butterfly-wing things. My life has been affected a lot more by deciding to wear a particular shirt one day than by any decisions I knew were important at the time. Maybe it's different for other people.

If I were to think about it in terms of "what would I do differently" instead of "what would have happened if", I think things fall into three general periods:

0-18: I don't want to talk or think about it.

18-24: The obvious choice here is to just avoid Mikayla like the plague. If I were replaying the game with my same character, as it were, I'd totally do that. If I were giving myself advice from the future, well, I learned a lot then. I'm not sure I'd be better off having never learned it, even if the process of learning that involved a lot of pain.

24-now: I'd have skipped a couple companies, that's about it. Probably have cut off my parents sooner and started going to therapy earlier.

Weirdly, this kind of thing is the subject of a recurring nightmare I've been having: "Sorry, there was a mistake, you're not actually an adult, you're still a kid. Now go back to school."

[thanate]

Back when I was living in PA my housemate and I used to have an ongoing conversational path about: "I don't want to go to [thing which involves leaving the house]." / "You never know, you might meet your true love there!" and the correlary that any of the things you didn't go to might have been the time you got in a horrible car accident and died.

It's all very well to second guess these things, but how in the world could you know, really?

[jazzfish]

That's an impressively bad argument, and I'm even a fan of leaving the house on occasion. The car accident sounds a lot more likely to me.

[thanate]

It was meant to be a most-drastic-case scenario: shorthand for "go do this, something good might come of it." Just the point being that a lot of the things that do change our lives look fairly small and incidental-- a conversation that makes you pay more attention to person X at the right moment, or stopping a moment before you hit that other car, and there's no way to know what factors you couldn't anticipate from that other path.

My grandparents met on a bus because she had to finish college somewhere she could go from home because of the depression and he had bought some kind of varnish that failed to dry and was taking it back to the store to complain. This sort of craziness is less likely to happen to those of us who try not to talk to strangers on buses, but I don't think the chances that brought grauwulf and me to start particularly paying attention to each other were any less coincidental.

Not that I mean to denigrate being in a place where you're comfortable enough to look back and not want to change things for fear of sacrificing what you've got.

[thanate]

(It might also be helpful to note that the roommate relationship above also involved a lot of exchanges like "It may rain." "Or we may all be murdered in our beds." "Well, it may rain before we're murdered in our beds.")

[jazzfish]

No, that makes perfect sense, but those are the kind of things you /can't/ plan for. And if I start thinking about them I start thinking about all the much more likely horrible things that could happen, and I end up spending the evening curled up in a ball on the couch.

Wow, that's a downer. I just need a plausible line of action whereby something will change for the better before I start doing random stuff I don't want to do for whatever reason, and the bar for 'plausible' is low but not so low that 'you might meet the love of your life!' will clear it. (In real-world situations, "Actually getting out and doing something will make you feel better" is often sufficient. And the cases where it's not are ones where I badly needed to recharge anyway.)

[vvalkyri]

Somehow all the more apropos having just watched The City on the Edge of Forever last night.

@jazzfish I so envy your self awareness.

Some of my major hinge points have, on the whole, been based on fear, and probably for the worst. I suppose not taking the not second but third opportunity to get into network security before the cert doors closed was based on hope, but while there were very very good times in that relationship with the wouldbe hiring manager that was sprouting just then, 8 years after that relationship officially ended I've yet to move on.

[jazzfish]

Thanks; I dunno if it's self-awareness or some sort of lack of taking responsibility for my screwups. Because the thing is, nearly all of those are cases where there was an objectively Right Thing to do, or at least a Better Thing, and I didn't.

Having had to rearrange my entire life plan & vision at the close of 2010 has sharpened my focus remarkably.

[blairmacg.livejournal.com]

I think you've reached a good point with your past--acknowledging what might be different, yet knowing what your personal through-line is. At least, it sounds that way from here. :-)

[jazzfish]

Thanks, and I'd like to think that. :) I'm still pretty mad about a number of things, but at least I'm not kicking myself over them.

[jameshroberts.livejournal.com]

Terry Pratchett calls this the "Trousers of Time". One entry point, two possible exits. I've never been good at working this out for myself. I have enough trouble figuring out what happened in the reality I _did_ take.

[jazzfish]

That works. There was a book by the very strange Tom Holt (author of "Who's Afraid of Beowulf?" among others) that posited that all choices are like picking the left-hand or right-hand path at a fork in the road... except that heroes can hare off into the bushes and make life difficult for everyone.

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

I think going to TJ was one of the biggest mistakes of my life--suddenly being downgraded from extraordinary to average put an end to my romance with academics, and I think made me more emotionally needy.

[jazzfish]

Hm. Interesting. Suddenly being 'average' may have made me more emotionally needy as well. To the left, it also meant I had a shot in hell of getting those needs met. Which was a new and stunning thing for me. (Not, I hasten to add, that I took as much advantage of it as I could have, but eh.)

(And based on my experience with academics, the sooner that romance gets nipped in the bud the better.)

[pictsy.livejournal.com]

To the left, it also meant I had a shot in hell of getting those needs met.

Good point. Extraordinariness was pretty lonely.