I had a moment about 3 years ago where I was sitting at a Lewis Black show and thought, "there's nothing I love more than comedy. I have to get a job working for a comedian." It was a revelation to me because up to that point I always thought I loved nothing more than music. What's hilarious about the revelation was that I'd already been on stage myself doing spoken word/comedy on and off throughout the years. I think I needed to have that big moment where I realized humor was the magic carpet I'd always relied upon to get me through. I researched comedians for about a year and then got a job as an assistant. I still have the job. It's a job that lets me use many of my skills. It's a job that's taken me down many good paths.

I'm not sure I believe in the notion of there being something only I can do. I do believe there's something I can tap into to do my best, though. And I feel like over the past couple years I've been doing a better job of being in tune with whatever that is.

HI LT!

I would guess (because I am never sure of anything) that probably when a friend of mine forced me to read something I had written at an open mic event at our high school. Until that point in time, I had written stuff, but most of it was just silly dabblings that made no sense to anyone other than myself. I realized then that perhaps, I had some chops as a writer. (Of course, as I type this, I haven't written anything of true substance in several months. Go figure.)

Probably also when I first started working at Hopkins. I mean, I kinda figured I wanted to go into something library-like when I got out of college, but it was moreso because that's what the career counselor suggested rather than anything I actually came up with on my own (aside from looking up the Dept. of Labor shit on it for the career dude). While at Hopkins, even though I've only been there 3 months, I feel like I belong. I feel at home, at peace, like this is where I'm meant to be. Hiding out in the stacks, searching through seemingly-endless batches of microfiche until I find the 1985 Journal of Geophysical Research, series D that I'm looking for. Hunting down articles on the internet in French and Italian.

I can only hope that the future is as hopeful and inspiring.

This is a negative experience, so I kind of hate to share it so early in your thread, but:

I was raised Southern Baptist, as I've mentioned here before, but by the time I got to college my experiences and hormones were conspiring to get me out of my childhood religion. I guess I was kind of a "soft" atheist by the time I moved to Atlanta.

I'd only been here six months or so the day I saw a guy get hit by a car while he was walking in a crosswalk.

He flew about fifteen feet, and I think he was dead when he hit the ground. The woman who hit him stepped out of her car and started screaming... she was still screaming when the ambulance arrived, 20 minutes or so later. I was the one who called 911; I'd seen the whole thing from my apartment window.

If I had any residual belief in a God that watches over us, it faded away when I watched a guy cover the dead man up with his raincoat out there in the middle of the street. When I was young I might have believed all that "Lord moves in mysterious ways" stuff, but when I saw a guy mowed down while he walked to the grocery store, dying on the pavement because some airhead in a Toyota ran a red light, I could no longer believe everything happened for a purpose.

I'd like to point out this did not make me a depressive person, nor one who needs to destroy other people's illusions... it was just the turning point at which I became a totally secular human being, and began to relate to everybody else in a completely different way than I had before.

Dang you, LT, I read this while checking basketball scores then couldn't fall back asleep due to cogitating on this.

Everything and nothing, so no, not mystical.

But this is the story I want to share.

My time as a young Grad School student was pivotal in many ways. A huge part of that was living in a group house for three years with an assortment of students from various D.C. universities. People came and went, but the typical make up of the house was three blacks, three lilly whites, a Puerto Rican and a Jew.

I wasn't raised racist - in fact my parents, especially given their generation - did a good job in that area. No hate speech, no limitations on the friends I chose.

But living with people of different backgrounds, talking, even joking about race, was so valuable and eye opening.

The Flintstones movie came out (with Halle Berry, remember)? One of the guys took a cartoon poster out of a box of Fruity Pebbles, this thing had about 80 people drawings on it, and put it on the wall. He wrote on it "Ain't No Brothas In Bedrock."

An undergrad, Irish Boston Liberal, friend came to visit. He saw this and said, "Oh my god, it's true!" All the cartoons were white.

The moment was my response. I could now see stuff like that automatically. I felt like, "Yeah. Duh."

Where I live I find that it's imperative and valuable to talk about race. Terrible shit went down just a generation ago. People's parents. It bothers me when people take the stance that even discussing race matters is somehow in itself, racist. The Get Over It stance.

Ain't No Brothas In Bedrock.

When I moved to India and realized what LIFE was all about. The poverty, the degradation, the people. It's a whole new world out there, which I was sort of shielded from, and then to be thrown into it all of a sudden, was like throwing a baby to a pack of wolves. (Not speaking about Indian people here, but the circumstances that are prevalent in India--the corruption, the pollution, the over-population--it was a bit much for me at the start.) Actually, it took a lot on my part to let go of all the "images" I had of what this country should be, and accept it for what it was, at the same time, trying to assure myself that I didn't have to be that way. Maybe I could go down a different path. That was a big revelation.

So, I guess--the most pivotal life moment for me was when I truly became Indian, or as close to one that I could become (still figuring out stuff everyday, or at least trying to).

It has been a nice journey so far.

When I broke my first engagement. Life turned technicolor at that instance.

I keep waiting and watching for a pivotal moment in my life, but it never happens. I always feel like I'm this person with unlimited potential in the right set of circumstances, but the code to let him out is never found. I can't point to one specific time in my life where I had some sort of revelation, or defining moment. There were times when I made discoveries that I thought were revolutionary, but ended up being false alarms. Who I am now hasn't come because of some kind of punctuated evolution, but rather through a boring, plodding one. Perhaps I'll make it to my deathbed without ever having cried the word "EUREKA", and if I don't, c'est la vie. It bothered me when I was younger, but now I'm much more accepting of who I am and my situation. Regrets can come later.

There have been many. But I think a good example was when I had a crush on a guy who was jerking me around a bit (interested, not interested, come-here-go-away) and I realized that the reason I had so many guys like this in my life was because I PICKED them. So I went into therapy and learned about love maps and how I was magically trying to "fix" my childhood (and life with a mother with borderline personality disorder) by picking someone who "blew hot and cold" and making them love me.

My pivotal moments often point me toward some good, hard self-work, though.

Pivotal moment #1: My first real drunk - I was probably 14. I spent the next 15 years or so either high, or drunk, or both.

After I got sober for the first time in 1991 I was sitting at a quasi-meeting at a rehab. A kid there (maybe he was 15) had gone out and gotten in trouble again for the nth time and he was about ready to take himself out. He had been hearing "around the tables" that if you take a drink while trying to get sober, you FAIL. Totally. And all the time that you had in sobriety no longer counted, for anything. Well, he just kept failing, and failing, and failing again, and I could tell he was done. Defeated, and he had come to say he was not coming back. And I'm sure that a lot of the problem was that he was sitting at these tables with a bunch of geezers who kept telling him he was wrong all the time. Because we tend to do that, especially to kids "boy, if I'd gotten sober at your age blah blah blah"...

So I said something along the lines that sobriety wasn't like a clock that you reset every time you have a drink. It's more like the two odometers in a car - you have the "real" odometer, and you have the "trip" odometer. Every day you stay sober, you tick over the real odometer and the trip odometer at the same time. If you take a drink, you reset the trip odometer, but you still clocked in some good sober time before that, so learn from the trip and move on, and hopefully, don't do it again. Yada yada yada and so forth. Not a standard message from AA, but then I don't think the standard AA platitudes hold a lot of water, anyway.

Well, that hit home, he started to cry, and got all silly about it, and I was embarrassed, and that was the very first time I helped anyone get it. And that meant that I got it too - the act of helping that kid made it almost imperative that I help others if I can. I've been doing it ever since at AA and NA youth meetings - I'm immature and get along well with teenagers, go figure - and it's kept me sober, with only one reset along the way. So thanks, kid, for being at the end of your rope - you helped me find my rope. That was pivotal moment number two.
The last pivotal moment I had was when I was talking to a friend about how many of us former drunks tend to think that "all the world's a stage, and all the people are actors, but I should be playing the lead" or something, and he turned around and looked at me and said "Well, I think I make a pretty good key grip" and I realized that I was running around with gaffer's tape and a screwdriver right with him, and it's really all you need, if the company's good. So now I try to be good company, and keep good company, and things are just fine.

Sorry this was so long...

My sophomore year of high school, our Blanche DuBois had a personal crisis and dropped out of A Streetcar Named Desire on the Monday before opening night. The cast didn't learn this until Tuesday, and at the urging of the stage manager and student director, I offered to step in so we wouldn't have to cancel the production. I had to learn one of the great roles in American theater between Tuesday afternoon and Thursday's dress rehearsal.

So I did.

And I did a good job, too. The director later told me that what I'd done wasn't possible, that he let me try because he was sure I would fail, which would resign the whole cast & crew to cancelling the show. When I succeeded, he was astonished.

Me, I didn't have time to be astonished. I was busy learning my lines.

It taught me that we can accomplish much more than we think, if we simply set aside the question "Will I fail?"

I thought that because I was good at thinking and liked to problem solve that I'd like to be a lawyer or at least go to law school. I got as far as applying and getting accepted before I had three stark realizations

1. I viscerally hate dressing up, lawyers have to dress up at least sometimes
2. I hate fighting with people if I can avoid it, lawyers have to do this all the time and sometimes they have to fight for thigns they don't believe in
3. I refuse to be in debt, law school is expensive

So I looked around at what else I liked to do, problem-solving-wise and wound up in library school, which was local and cheap, so no debt and have been more or less happy with it ever since. I meet a lot of happy lawyers, but they are different from me.

Mainly, have any of you had a pivotal moment in your lives when something you took part in or that happened to you called out to you and said "this is who you are, come along now..."

Grad school has been this way for me. Even applying to grad school was this way for me. I've always been really good at academic stuff and involved in lots of extracurricular stuff, but when I decided to go into counseling, that was the first time *everyone* around me said, "Oh my god, yes, that's *perfect* for you." And then when I was writing my application essay I started thinking, "Hey, you know, this is actually a perfect use of my skills." And then I also remembered that when I was 12, my birthday present from my friends was their writing and performing a song about how they could always come to me for advice and I'd steer them right.

And as I've gone through my classes and traineeship and picked up more techniques and theories and experience, it just keeps feeling like more and more of the random things I like to do and like to think about are coming into play and making me a really good therapist. It doesn't feel like I'm picking up a new skill set; it feels like I'm rediscovering and rearranging bits of myself that have always been there, and that I've always liked, but that weren't valued in my previous jobs and so I hid them away or thought of them as limitations or weak points. Now they're many of the things I value most about myself.

Or, also - do any of you believe in that mystical notion that there is something that only YOU can do, and if so, what is that something?

Yes. I believe that only I can be me.

And are you in sync with it now, and what is the outcome or effect on your life?

Trying to get there. Sometimes I try to be other people, or pretend I don't have the limitations and strengths that I actually have, and I'm getting better at realizing when that happens and reminding myself just to be me. But I think that's a pretty lifelong process of acceptance and enlightenment, so I try not to get upset with myself for forgetting. :-)

When I decided to end my first marriage. I finally "got it" that I didn't deserve the treatment I was getting, that it wasn't getting better, that I was the only one interested in trying to work on the marriage, and that my sons didn't deserve to grow up in that kind of household. My kids gave me more of a feeling of self worth than ever before - and I found inner strength I never knew I had. Moving out on my own was a big, BIG move for me, and while it was hard, it was the best thing ever.

I will give you three:
1. In kindergarten, my oldest brother's friend Wayne stopped by our house on his way home to show off the new trumpet he got from the school music program. I asked him if I could hold it. He let me. It was cool and heavy. I knew at that moment that I had to play trumpet and kept it in my head for 5 years until I had the same option. I fought to play (the music teacher thought I should play sax). I play to this day (now 32 years later) and know that it is so much a part of me that I could just as soon stop breathing as I could stop playing trumpet.
2. In 1993 I suffered a deep vein thrombosis. I had a clot that went from ankle to groin. During my stay in ICU, I had the deep, painful realization that not only was I mortal, but that thread that holds me here is frail.
3. When they rushed my in-labor wife into an operating room for an emergency C-Section for my daughter being born, I was struck by the realization that I might lose one or both. When her arrival came with a diagnosis of Down syndrome, and a stroke, and a heart defect, and pneumonia, and God knows what else, I knew that I was being called to help raise this girl to the best of her abilities.

Nope. I've been on this course pretty much the whole time.

Boring, yes, but what the hell, I'm an engineer; comes with the territory.

Mine was also in India, when I stayed there for three months aged 7 (my dad was working near Agra). Coming from a very middle-class, small, planned city in Australia, I felt I was being introduced to the WORLD, and that the world was a huge place and full of all sorts of amazing, interesting people. And I've kept that outlook since.

The BF came to the hospital with me when my nephew was born. My sister had a scheduled induction, so we were there all day. He didn't want to go at first, but ended up really getting to know my mom and dad. I realized then that I want to marry him and have babies. There are other moments like this, but this is the one that sticks out in my mind.

I just re-read my post and it's lame.

Kind of sounds sweet to me actually.

goo. Wow, that's so cool. (It really must've been an eye-opener at age seven to have gone through that all of a sudden. At least I knew what I was getting into [sort of] because of the vacations that I took over there every year, but those were always as an NRI [Non Resident of India] so it just wasn't the same.)

When I learned to read, and thereby found my world.

I just re-read my post and it's lame.

I really don't think it is.

I agree.