You honestly never know how your life is going to turn out. Whether your decision to go out with friends on a Friday night will be something you forget or something that alters the course of your life, for better or for worse.
If you want to believe in fate, or something like it, these 11 accounts of how lives were changed by the smallest of choices will surely give you some food for thought.
11. How bad does the foster system have to be that a kid would rather be beaten at home?
I lied to CPS when I was 13, I finished growing up with my dad instead of being taken away. I knew what I was doing and looking back I wouldn’t change it. I’ve met some wonderful people and I don’t think I would’ve met them if I had told the truth that day
10. We all choose wrong sometimes when we’re young.
There was an incident where a good friend of mine got kicked out of where we were living. The owner called me and told me the whole thing and said I was welcome to stay because I had not created any of the problems. My friend came to tell me about it and told me “we have to move out”. I told her I was told something different and she snapped at me that I couldn’t stay there if she wasn’t there. I was too much of a coward to stand up to her and deal with the consequences of losing that friendship. So I left that house and struggled for years. School would have been easier, I could have saved, gotten a car. That was such a defining moment and I’m so sorry I chose wrong. I was 18.
9. Oh, AOL. How we miss you.
I met a guy online on AOL in 1994. Fell in love. Moved 2300 miles away from home to be with him. Could have been a disaster. But 26 years later, we are happily married and are still very much in love. Best decision I’ve ever made!
8. Who would have thought a math textbook could do good?
When I moved and switched middle schools wayyy back I threw out all my stuff except for my math textbook. When I went to my new school the math class I was in was a little bit behind from where I was and I told them but they didn’t believe me. But then I showed my old math textbook to show that I was way ahead of that class. Two of my classes were changed, and in both of my new classes we’re a bunch of friends I made. If i threw away that math textbook I wouldn’t have any good friends right now.
7. Betrayal by pizza. Nooooo!
Ordered a pizza from Dominos. Wound up with the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had, I was essentially bedridden for 3 months and I’ve since developed severe post-infectious IBS that I’ve been struggling with for the past 3 years. I’m basically not functional probably 50% of the time, it’s essentially destroyed my quality of life, and I’m terrified that I may never have a normal life again. It’s taken everything I enjoyed or was passionate about away from me.
Fuck killing Hitler. If I had a time machine, I’d go back in time and stop myself from eating that fucking pizza.
6. He’s some kind of guardian angel!
When I was 27 i missed my usual train to work and had to wait another 30 minutes. So I got to talking to a random guy who turned out to be a doctor, he noticed dark patch under my nail and recommended i go get it checked out. It urned out to be subungual melanoma (Skin Cancer). I thought it was a bruise and probably wouldn’t of went the doctors over it. I never saw him again.
5. I imagine enlisting in the military changes most people.
I enlisted in the US Army in 1966.
I was on a college-prep track in high school, honors and AP classes, took all the PSATs and SATs. I had been admitted to a couple of universities. I was on-track for Law School and a legal career.
I was kind of sick of it. So I broke out. I had no idea what I had just put myself in for. Did NOT come out of that maelstrom as the same person I was when I went in.
I’ve written a few meditations on that adventure on reddit.
4. Usually people have a good feeling that doesn’t work out.
I moved in with my then boyfriend after only knowing him for three months. I had a bad feeling about it like we’d crash and burn.
That was in 2001. We’re still together and married now.
3. Every high school kid should read this!
Going to trade school.
For some background, I am a young woman. After being moved out for several years and accumulating some meager savings, it was time to begin looking at post-secondary options.
The course that piqued my interest was in a separate province, but my parents offered to both pay for my tuition and let me move back home if I chose a course closer to home.
This was a trap.
After selecting a course with transferable skills to the course I had planned to take (welding and machining), my father drove me to the office at the school to pay for the course. In front of the entire office staff, he laughed in my face, telling me he was never planning to pay for anything except a music degree.
Horrified, I decided then and there to use my line of credit and savings to pay for the course. Unfortunately, my father took the opportunity to max out my line of credit and bank account to leave me with no additional funds after paying for the school. Now, I could not just move out again.
The year that followed was grueling and harsh, my sister committed suicide and I contracted mono as an adult. In the process, I booted my father from my account and moved back out, having to expand the line of credit in the process.
I finished the course with the program excellence award, as the only woman present, and 5 years later I have successfully passed my Red Seal exam as a millwright.
My debts are paid, my job is incredible, and I moved cities. Life has never been better, despite the rough path that it took to arrive here.
2. They hide a disturbing number of veteran services pretty well.
Freshman year I asked some kid in the college dorms cafeteria if we could sit as his table because all the others are full.
Start small talking and he mentions his tuition is free because his dad is military. I’m like wait… my dad is military and I’m paying?
He says that it’s because his dad is now disabled. Well it turns out some of my dads ailments from military service qualify him as disabled and guess who got free college after that. And my sister too.
They hide the website pretty well and they DEFINITELY don’t tell vets about the program for their dependents so my family never would have known if I hadn’t sat down with some random guy. Thanks guy!
1. This just gave me chills.
Wanted to see the Eiffel tower.
Me and my girlfriend at the time were traveling from New Zealand to my family back home in Sweden. We both decided to spend a bit more money to fly back through Paris instead of Amsterdam, just because we wanted to see the tower. It cost us maybe an extra $50 and we got to see it on the landing and then take off, but never actually set foot in Paris proper because we were poor students.
When we landed in Auckland, New Zealand, jetlagged to shit, we turn on our phones and notice that we have about 50 missed calls from our travel agent, which was odd. When we call her, she sounds super relieved and out of breath. She tells us the flight she originally suggested to us, the one from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, was shot down over Ukraine. My brain couldn’t process that information at the time, but once I woke up the next day it hit me like a ton of bricks. $50 made the difference between seeing the big steel thingy that has so many photos of it and bring sent to Sweden in body bags piece by piece.
Sometimes the absurdity of my existence comes over me, and this story always gives me goosebumps. One hell of a story to tell over beers, though.
You can’t think about stuff like this every day, other wise each decision you make would become agonizing, right?
Do you have a story like this? Tell us what small choice you made changed everything!
