What has been the deepest influence on your life?

The kidnapping of my children.

Moving abroad on my own for the first time (shortly before turning 17). It was a scary, liberating and exciting experience – definitely a positive influence!

leaving my parents home

I would have to say that the deepest influence on my life was my mother dying when I was young. I say that because the ripples are still reverberating today, some 30 years later. Her death enabled me to have an incredibly relationship with my little sister that I am sure would not have been the same otherwise. It taught me the importance of being resilient and accepting things that cannot be changed, and moving forward in the face of whatever comes my way.

moving from Azerbaijan to Russia and then to the US, my brother’s death, postpartum depression, the context and birth of my children, my current relationship, in that order

I watched and didn’t help a fellow swimming student struggle and nearly drown because I didn’t like him. Fortunately, our swimming teacher got back in time.

I was 16. That day I realized I needed to work on my empathy.
time to help him.

I would like to say there was one huge, profound moment in my life that set me on a clear and definite course to my “now”.

I would be lying.

All of the moments and events of my life, from the sublime to the tragic, have collectively and profoundly influenced my present.

I’m the little sister of @SuperMouse. I never had a mom – except for her. Even though we’re both grown women now, she tries to keep me right. Not sure it’s happened, but it’s been a trip. Our mother’s death has got to be the single most impactful moment in our lives. I don’t have any idea what I’d be if it hadn’t happened. I can tell you I’ve grown into a ridiculously big bitch who keeps everything real and I don’t mix words. Hmm…what does that say? I’m not an unhappy, sulky person, I just don’t deal well with shit. My mantra is, “If you’ve got nothing good to offer, get away from me. Life’s too short to live in stress. Take out whatever is in your way.”

Where did I get that, sis?

When I was 19, I’m 24 now, I found out I was pregnant. The situation wasn’t ideal and in most cases that alone would have a large impact on my life.
My daughter was delivered by emergency c-section 12 weeks early. She weighed 1lb,1oz. She passed away when she was 5 days old.
This huge loss affects me still on a day-to-day basis. It has changed the way I look at life, love, religion, how I parent my son and so much more.
I feel I should say that it has had a purely negative effect, but the truth is that I cannot honestly say that. Yes, I would do anything to hold Lexi in my arms again-but I also have an amazing son and husband that I love with all my heart.

As a kid at elementary school age, I used to have a rather mean sense of humour, and one friend whom I had unknowingly been offending deeply for a long time by making teasing jokes at his expense. And I was too socially dense ever to notice until one day he confronted me about it. It was rather shocking.
I think that has been the most influential of a number of events that turned me into the kind of person that constantly doubts whether his impressions are really accurate and reconsiders his assumptions at the drop of a hat. First as a hardcore agnostic-about-everything philosopher in my teenage years, rejecting all worldly knowledge as uncertain and unverifiable based on the idea that the whole world might as well not exist; and more recently as a more moderate sceptic young adult, finally finding a good reason to be certain about anything again in the principles of the scientific method that say that even though next to nothing can be 100% certain, some assumptions are probable enough to take your chances with.

I don’t think I can lead all of that back to that one event, and certainly there have been plenty of other factors that helped shape this life philosophy. But I do think that anecdote is my best example of the kind of thing that set off this development and, ultimately, made me who I am now.

As a side note: to really answer the question, the single deepest influence on my life would inevitably be that one decisive event when that one sperm cell reached that one ovum.
Someone else worded this fact much more impressively than I could.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existence still had plenty of hurdles to leap. Most conceptuses end in early abortion before their mother even knew they were there, and we are all lucky not to have done so. Also, there is more to personal identity than genes, as identical twins (who separate after the moment of fertilization) show us. Nevertheless, the instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.”

(Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, opening paragraphs)

Beer.

1 Surviving a heart attack at the age of 18 and to wake up six days later, only to be told that it was due to wrong medication subscribed by a doctor.
2 To loose your virginity to your best friends girlfriend.

@loser…I love you man. You can say in one simple word what it takes me 52 words and 3 paragraphs to say.

we need to have a beer together someday

the birth of each child and surviving the loss of two husbands in less than 10 years.

Raising my little sister. My mom leaving me, being kicked out of my aunts house for no reason right after my mom teyed to kill herself. Music. The love of my boyfriend. Being chased by an insane person across the country and fearing for my life everyday for six years. Im so much better off than most people my age tho and i love my life. I am so blessed.

Not wanting to be like my mother.

@janbb i hear you

Joining the military.

A solid upbringing by my parents, a multitude of life experiences, and 21+ years in the military all have had deep influences on my life

Growing up without a father.

A statement I read in Pres. Eisenhower’s autobiography when I was a kid. It went something like this: if you let others make decisions for you, you end up living their life, not yours. Out of everything that’s influenced me it’s the most obvious and permanent.

never meeting my dad until i was 5 and then him leaving again 2 years later and was gone for 2 years then the next time i saw him he had a girlfriend and now they are married and have 2 daughters and now he is a part of my 2 older siblings and I.

@LouisianaGirl you haven’t been around in a while – welcome back!

Without question – my father. Both in good ways and bad ways but he always lives in my heart and I miss him every day.

My father, also.
I recently passed the age he was when he died. I miss him terribly.