The Road Not Taken

Recently, the question was posed to me by a pal from back-in-the-day, "Where would I be if I had stayed in my 'home town' after high school graduation and done what was expected of me, planned for me, and wanted, initially, by me?"

That's a tough one.  I simply DON'T KNOW!  What about you?  Did you stick around or ditch your original plans and adventure forth?  Making that choice doesn't necessarily guarantee an actual adventure, however.  Some of us probably are more acquainted with this idea than others.  Staying put doesn't imply that one is a bland stick-in-the-mud, either.  Both directions can seem impossible or impossibly right.

I'm not sure which choice would have been the better one for me.  Hindsight does offer a better view but 20/20?  Don't know about that.  What I recall is that what seemed most comfortable to me at that fateful juncture in the road between my childhood and impending young adulthood created a high sense of discomfort for most everyone around me.

There was no steady boyfriend.  Not in high school.  Not directly after.  There were two boys for whom I harbored a steady crush the entire year -- one in my junior year, one in my senior -- and they, being well aware of it, chose to make a move on the pretty but definitely different Sweigard girl only AFTER school let out.  Each crush swiftly deflated.  Evidently for me, the fun was in the anxious and uncertain chase.  A minor fling with my best male friend ended swiftly.  Should have never happened.  Strong feelings for a man ten years my senior yielded nothing more than an unhealthy obsession that could lead nowhere for either of us.  Hence, staying on would NOT have ended in a marriage for me.  At least not as anything planned and desired.

My brain, and the experiences of my life, were what mattered to those around me.  To teachers, to my grandma and mother, to my friends, to the kind vice-principal who worked so hard to help me gain entrance into a college.  To the decision-makers at UC Santa Cruz who read my application essay and mailed off that wonderful acceptance letter with the full-tuition offer: that which would enable me to study psychiatry in my pursuit to help others who had experienced trauma to change their worlds for the better.  To my Uncle Zan who wished to see me attend an ivy-league university.  Even to my eager, full-of-promise, but also intensely unsure and afraid self.

But after all the planning and thought and focused energy exerted in the pursuit of my academic future, I caved in to my fears.  I was a virtual Humpty-Dumpty of a mixed-up young woman.  Seemingly confident on the outside but roiling with doubts and insecurities on the inside.  Deep within was the belief that truly good things, especially the good things I wanted, were not to be mine.  So to pursue them would be vain effort.  And those around me who cared, they hoped to put me back together again as someone more like them and less like what I was raised to be.  So dogged were they in this pursuit, that they neglected to actually get to know the real me.  Instead, I felt they were intent upon creating a new me who would one day become wholly unrecognizable to me.  I feared the loss of an identity I had yet to fully grasp.

My son told me once that I should be in school because I'm too smart not be there.  God love him.  That was one of those fine moments in life that sits well on a glass shelf and reflects light back with a startling beauty each time it is enjoyed.  A moment which never would have happened if I had stayed in California and become a UCSC Banana Slug (yes, that was, and is, their mascot) in the fall of 1988.

Though I often regret, mildly mind you, my decision to ditch higher learning for marriage and babies, I don't regret my life as it unfolded on the other side.  There were intense lows and serious highs.  I gave birth to three highly colorful personalities with the potential to create their own waves of impact on the shores of their lives.  I married a man who was entranced with me upon first sight, and four years later he came back for more . . . that was twenty-one years ago.  He still makes me laugh.  I still confound and enchant him.  The people who have come into my personal space and taken up permanent residence as friends and neighbors and reconnected family are the richest tapestry of humanity possible to imagine.  I have learned.  Oh, how I have learned.

In all honesty, the only point I seriously ponder is the area of study I chose.  If I had achieved the end result and started my own practice, would my knowledge have gifted me with the insight into my own brother's mind and saved him from seventeen years of incarceration?  Would my experience have lent me the power to decipher and stop the puzzle of psychosis in my sister which led to the death of her two children?  Therein lies a cruel irony concerning the two most painful chapters in my life.

The great WHAT IF?