Could you list the most pivotal moments in your life?

I’d never given the idea much thought until I read a novel in which pivotal moments were a major theme. The characters, who possessed wildly different personalities, uncannily shared a few major life events that could be traced back to similar pivotal moments. These moments shaped the characters’ paths in different ways. I started to think about my own pivotal moments, and wondered how they’d impacted my character.

What would be the benefit of listing them? It could help me explore where my life could’ve led, which is always interesting. It could deepen my perspective on my own values, based on the choices I’ve made. It could also give me new things to write about.

Bingo!

In my reading and writing, I love to delve into characters’ deepest inner realizations. It’s always my favorite part of a book. And often these realizations come at pivotal moments, whether they be big or small. For example, in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, one of Harry’s pivotal moments comes when he first meets Draco Malfoy. Draco taunts Ron Weasley– whom Harry has also only just met on the Hogwarts Express– about Ron’s family’s poverty, then tells Harry he can help him meet the “right kind” of wizards. Harry’s response, that he can judge the right kind of wizard for himself, not only sets him and Draco up to be years-long enemies, but reveals Harry’s deeper nature to himself. It’s the first time that he steps up to protect the oppressed and show loyalty to his friends. This shapes his character and choices for years to come.

I’m now toying with the idea of writing an essay collection around the theme of pivotal moments. To give myself a push, I thought I’d take today’s post to list the ten most pivotal moments in my life. Some of them stemmed from my own choices; some came as the result of someone else’s choice; some were simply fate. I listed them in chronological order, because trying to weight them against each other felt arduous and unnecessary.

What’s almost as interesting as the list itself is what got left out. For example: my husband proposing. It was a big moment, of course! But I can’t call it a pivotal one. We’d been on that path for awhile, and it didn’t change much about our relationship. Another example: my daughter, our second child, being born. Again, one of the most important days of my life, but it didn’t fully change my identity the way it did when my oldest was born and I became a mother for the first time.

The Ten Most Pivotal Moments in My Life

• Age 8/9/10: Reading Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and the rest of L.M. Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott’s works. Countless books have changed my life in ways big and small, but these two books and their kin shaped my character in ways I can’t begin to describe. They were also the first two books that I completely fell in love with, setting me up to be a lifelong reader.
• Age 11/12: Wanting to quit playing flute in band, but choosing to stick with it (heavily influenced by my mom’s insistence). It was the first time I learned that things actually can– and often do– get better if you stick with them. I made this choice over and over again until it was no longer a choice, but part of my identity. Imagine if I had quit– my entire career would have been different.
• Age 14: Being told I had cancer, the day after my fourteenth birthday. If I did rank this list, my cancer diagnosis would have to be at the top. There was life before cancer, and there is life after. Coming as it did when I was a developing teen, I don’t even know what sort of adult I would have become without it.
• Age 17: Taking a trip to SUNY Potsdam in the spring of my senior year. Before that trip, I had planned to attend SUNY Fredonia. I had been to Fredonia for a woodwind quintet camp the summer before and was accepted into the flute studio without having to audition. But I had also applied to Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, because most of my music teachers had gone there. I got into both, but didn’t plan to go to Potsdam. When I’d visited the campus, it had been a very ugly February day, and I found it uninspiring. Before deciding, though, my dad persuaded me to take another trip up to Potsdam to check it out. I did, and on second chance, I began to love the school. I attended for all four years, got an amazing education, and met my closest friends and future husband there.
• Age 20: My future husband deciding to spend one more night at the NYSSMA conference in our junior year. I didn’t know him very well at that point, but I think both of us had started to feel the chemistry between us. He was supposed to go back to Crane a night early for a rehearsal, but decided to stay with the group for another night instead. We ended up staying up until 3:00 in the morning talking. That conversation hasn’t stopped to this day.
• Age 28: Meeting with our first mortgage broker. We met with two before buying our house. The first one convinced us that the price range we were looking at was too high. We lowered it, and still managed to find a house that has served us well for the last ten years. If we hadn’t met with that woman, we might have bought a too-expensive house just as the housing bubble was collapsing.
• Age 29: Sharing my writing for the first time at the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. I signed up for the writing class on the advice of a friend who told me I should pursue a hobby separate from my music teaching job. Before that time, I’d been unsuccessfully trying to shoehorn myself into the typical expectation of music teachers, to perform professionally on our instruments in our spare time. I loved the class from the start– the teacher, the assignments, the trip to Manhattan each week that summer. But it wasn’t until I shared my writing in the workshop session that I realized I might actually have something more.
• Age 29: Watching a CBS Sunday Morning Special on children with terminal illnesses. The sight of the children stringing beads in their hospital ward made me burst into tears, and suddenly I realized what had been blocking me from wanting to have my own children– I was afraid they’d end up with cancer, or some other serious illness, like me. The realization helped me and my husband work through it, and we got pregnant about a year later. (I wrote this story in more detail in The Birth of Fear, published by Hippocampus Magazine in 2017.)
• Age 31: The night I sleep-trained my son. His birth made me a mother, but it took me several long months to figure out what kind of mother I wanted to be. The night I finally sleep-trained him was the night that I learned to recognize how he needed to be taught; to take care of myself so that I could take care of him; and to stop listening to all the so-called ‘experts’ and trust my own gut as a parent. I haven’t turned back from those values since.
• Age 34: Getting the email that Suzie, my now-literary agent, wanted to set up a call that would end in signing me as her client. Although my first book failed to find a publisher, connecting with Suzie legitimized my writing hobby into a true side-hustle, and helped me own the title of Writer.

So that’s my ten. I’m going to sit with them for awhile and then maybe add a few more. Next, I’ll see which ones I want to flesh out further, and my essay collection will start to take shape.

Ask a friend: “Tell me one of your pivotal life moments!” You’ll learn a great deal from the answer. And while you’re at it, share one of your pivotal moments with us in the comments!