What's The Most Pivotal Moment Of Your Adulthood?
Lots of easy answers for this one, including:
I bet about 70% of people would choose the first two buckets, and if not those, it would probably be something about career. That’s pretty standard when engaging around this question.
Now, I’ve been married twice, and had two weddings (although one was during COVID), and I can tell you that the marriage day is important, but it’s a flawed narrative to say it’s the greatest or most Pivotal day of adulthood. If that’s true, what about everything that comes after it? The wedding can’t really be the apex, or the marriage won’t be that great. I mean, right?
I’ve never had kids, so I haven’t experienced that joy. At this point, I would probably chop off part of my right leg to have someone emerge from a bathroom with a positive pregnancy test, or to be in the room when a newborn is delivered. I will likely never get either of those things, and at this point, it’s just something I need to fully come to grips with.
My career has largely been a chicken fart with a few positive pockets and big-name brands. I think most corporate work is meandering and pointless and it ultimately becomes a series of meetings, emails, calls, and nodding yes to people who make more money all so that you’re not on the next layoff list. I’ve been doing service industry for a little bit recently, which is better in some ways, but you still have hellish people around who tip you 80 cents on a $52 bill, and that’s distressing in its own right.
So I started thinking about my pivotal moment to date.
I think it’s when I moved from NYC to Minneapolis in 2012. I knew NYC was expensive and would only get more expensive with more years there, but my ex-wife and I had a pretty good life and a neighborhood full of friends and we were generally “making” it. I think I was running from having grown up in NYC and living in the same city with my parents but barely ever seeing them, and just wanting to do something different. I also got into this MSLOC program at Northwestern, but I think the financial aid was harder. That program was shorter and I think I would have enjoyed Chicago, so I think a lot about going back and redoing that. Instead, I ended up in Minneapolis, in a program geared mostly towards people getting HR jobs when it was done. I am not a big HR-type person.
By virtue of the move to Minneapolis, my then-wife and I went from a community to having just each other, knowing no one, being unclear about next professional steps, being cold, and having to pony up for air travel a lot. We were actually living in Minneapolis when we got married (2013). About a year later, in April 2014, we had a huge fight in Uptown Minneapolis. We should have probably ended it then, in all honesty. Instead, a few months later we moved to Texas together. We lasted about three years there.
Most of my life at 42 is downstream of that Minneapolis move. I probably could have still gotten divorced if I never moved, because we had issues for sure, but if I had gone to Chicago in 2012, or stayed in NYC, I think things might have broken differently. Minneapolis also broke my spirit professionally. I was never a very good white-collar worker, but I always thought I had some pedigree re: my background and some places I had worked, I.e. ESPN. In Minneapolis, I was constantly reminded in career center meetings that none of it mattered and no one cared. I sat in mostly-useless classes with kids who were in college the year before. I realized quickly I had made the wrong decision.
There have been great moments since then, absolutely. But at this point, that was the Pivotal Moment of my adulthood, and I fumbled that snap. I’m still trying to pick up that slippery, wet ball that I fumbled and run it into some end zone. I still believe in myself, if less than I did.
What’s your Pivotal Moment so far?