To ask what was your 'sliding doors' moment?

[Fairyicecream]

For those that haven't seen the film Sliding Doors, it basically showed how different her life turned out if she caught the train/didn't catch the train.

What was one decision, one moment that could have changed your whole life?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A few years ago my marriage went through a bad patch (understatement to say the least). DH talked about leaving. It was the worst time of my life and I honestly don't know how I got through it.

Anyway, i often wonder, what if I had just told him to go? We would now all be living separately and we and our beautiful DC would have a completely different life.

Instead, we are all now happier than we have ever been. But it could have all been so different with that one decision...

I went travelling to America in my mid 20s. While I was there I secured a job I loved, and the manager said he could support me to apply for a visa to stay as long as I was willing to stay at the firm for a while. I was worried about leaving my parents, even though I am one of 4. My mum put pressure on me to come home. Now, 20 years on, I recognise that most major decisions I have made were about making my mum happy. I am still near my mum. I still do everything for her. I wish I'd stayed.

Mammylamb I remember

Mine is a MN one. I clicked on an active thread relating to a topic that I had a passing interest in. I realised it was a long-running thread, but posted anyway (unlike me). A few months later there was talk of a meet-up IRL. I went along (again, unlike me). As a result if this I now have the most amazing set of friends. We’ve been through so much over the past 6 years or so. We’ve had meals together and been on holiday together. They are my rock and absolutely keep me sane. And yet it would’ve been so easy to just scroll on by...

Mine is a very simple "would have been dead" one. I was going to move home in about a month and a friend was coming round that day to help me get started on packing and sorting. I'd had a blinding headache for nearly a week, saw the doctor who thought it was a viral thing that had followed on from pneumonia. The friend turned up that morning and unbeknownst to me I was talking gibberish and making no sense at all. She called an ambulance. I remember thinking I had no idea why she was doing that but decided to let her do her thing. A paramedic came in and when he was there I told him I was just going to lie down as I felt a little faint. Had a massive seizure and when I came too I had a bruise on my chest. I thought he'd punched me in the chest and yet still agreed to go to the ambulance with him.

Anyway, long story short, I had a massive brain haemorrhage and if my friend hadn't been there I would almost certainly have died because I was alone and had no idea that I was so seriously ill.

Went on a night out with a group of people I only knew very distantly for someone who was leaving the area (very very out of character). Spent the evening chatting to another girl there, connected on Facebook and became the best of friends in a matter of weeks. I had no close friendships previously to this. 10 years later and were still just as close and I’d be lost without her. We wouldn’t have met if I hadn’t of gone on that random night out!

If I hadn’t agreed in the heat of the moment to my ex not pulling out and me then taking the morning after pill (which didn’t work) I would not have my DS.
I definitely don’t regret it but I won’t be making that sliding doors mistake again.

I am forever thankful that I agreed to let my 16 year old son revise at home for his exams rather than go into school to revise with the class. He said he would get more quality revision done at home as the lessons were too general. The exam was only days away and I had to make sure he choose well, against my better judgement I said I trusted him to make the decision and he could stay at home and revise. I had no medical conditions but out of the blue an hour later I collapsed and had a grand mal seizure and stopped breathing. He was an athlete and knew first aid through that. He gave me mouth to mouth resuscitation, called the ambulance and basically saved my life. I was put into an induced coma and was very ill for a while. If I would have made him go into school, I would be dead as it would have been another 6 hours before someone came home and found me. Always makes me shiver to think what could have been. I am Incredibly proud of him.

@ItCouldBeBunnies. Every September I still cry about it. Walkers crisps once had an advert with a bus crashing into a bridge. I’d be watching the ad and my husband would turn the telly for no reason. After this happened a few times I asked him why: he eventually told me that he thought it would be too upsetting for me to see, and he had complained to walkers (apparently other people had too)

A few years after the crash TFI Friday had a clip shown from inside a bus crashing into a bridge on it. I was in my boyfriends house and was screaming watching it. He drove me home to my parents and they knew what I had saw and had already called channel 4 to complain

Choosing to go to university with the rest of the herd instead of going to art college when art had always been my love.

Not so much one moment but a choice I made.

I come from a working class town in the north where people don’t ever leave. My old classmates still live there and work minimum wage jobs, have multiple kids etc. At 11 years old I knew that wasn’t for me. My mantra throughout secondary school was “work hard so you can get the hell out of here”. That choice, to work hard rather than smoke & drink at the park with boys, meant that I didn’t fit in - but that I would go on to earn a degree at a top university, build a well paid career, and live in a beautiful part of the country. If I ever see anything on Facebook relating to those I went to school with, I’m taken back to the choice I made as a little Year 7 pupil - that I would never, ever end up like them.

Taking a job offers to my friend who turned it down. I said okay. No tight. No discussion with my then boyfriend. Off I went .

Now married to someone else living somewhere completely different. For decades it was one of the biggest regrets of my life.

If I'd finished my test in a job interview earlier or later things might have been different. I was a few months out of uni with a very good philosophy/literature degree. A publication had a number of roles going simultaneously so I should have been in with a decent chance of getting it. I think I did the test pretty well, but then you got one or other interviewer depending when you finished it.

I got the more junior person who, I could tell even then even then, didn't know how to interview. And I guess because I hadn't been to many interviews, I didn't really know how to bring anything out with a poor interviewer. I always feel like I might have got it if I'd been interviewed by the other person!

If I had got it, I'd have not done a masters, bought a home a year earlier (I had an inheritence for a deposit, but couldn't borrow until I was earning), and I might not have ended up spending enough time at home online to have joined a website where I two years later heard about a rave where I met my future husband!

When I was a teenager, I had an interview for a YTS job and was given a choice of two stores, I picked the smaller shop, as the other one was a large department store.
I made friends with one of the other girls who was also on the same scheme and got to know her brother and we started going out together. Thirty two years later we are now married with children.
I do occasionally wonder how my life would have turned out if I had picked the other place.

When i met my DP, i had just come out of a toxic relationship. I had been invited to a party at a friend's that i hadnt seen for some years. I decided to go out with another friend to a party where i didn't know anyone. Dp only was there because he had bumped into a friend that day. 28 years later ....

I was just talking to my mum about this. I think If I'd stayed on at my Steiner kindergarten instead of moving to the nursery attached to my future infant school I would have turned out nicer, more confident and higher achieving. Purely down to how happy and comfortable I felt there, it was like a family.

I agreed to being transferred to a different hospital whilst in labour with DD because my home hospital didn’t have an incubator free (she was prem so they said she might need one).

Different hospital f*cked up (I believe) and DD has cerebral palsy.

I wish I had refused to be transferred. DD never needed an incubator anyway.

@Mammylamb

Mine is very sad.

I was a girl guide in 1994, I went on lots of trips with them. One day they were going a day trip and uncharacteristically I decided not to go (my mum thinks it’s because she was skint and I didn’t want to ask for money).

On the way home the bus crashed and killed a number of the guides and leaders.

More than 25 years later I still remember my cousin banging our door screaming for my mum as she had heard about the crash first, and assumed that I was on the bus

Oh God, I'm sorry x glad you are ok.

Caniputmytreeupyet it might be that those people are also very happy with thier choices.

When we were looking to buy a house we were looking in a vaguely similar area to where we were living which was kind of ok but nothing special and we couldn't really afford the kind of house we wanted. A colleague of DH was looking at 6 bed town houses on the Kent coast for the same price as we were looking at rubbish 3 bed semis. That particular town was too far but someone said "I hear X is nice". I'd never even heard of the town. We went to look and bought the second house we looked at. Now we've been settled in our gorgeous seaside town for about 16 years and I can't imagine living anywhere else and so glad our kids are growing up here. Every time I go near one of the places we might have lived in, I am incredulous at how different our lives would have been.

@Ravenesque

Mine is a very simple "would have been dead" one. I was going to move home in about a month and a friend was coming round that day to help me get started on packing and sorting. I'd had a blinding headache for nearly a week, saw the doctor who thought it was a viral thing that had followed on from pneumonia. The friend turned up that morning and unbeknownst to me I was talking gibberish and making no sense at all. She called an ambulance. I remember thinking I had no idea why she was doing that but decided to let her do her thing. A paramedic came in and when he was there I told him I was just going to lie down as I felt a little faint. Had a massive seizure and when I came too I had a bruise on my chest. I thought he'd punched me in the chest and yet still agreed to go to the ambulance with him.

Anyway, long story short, I had a massive brain haemorrhage and if my friend hadn't been there I would almost certainly have died because I was alone and had no idea that I was so seriously ill.

Wow, how similar are our stories?

Glad to hear you are ok too.

When I first went to Uni and I was going to go to a sports clubs freshers event to see if I wanted to join. When it came to going there was no one who wanted to come with me, it was dark and raining and I couldn't be bothered. For some reason I made myself go and met my now husband.

An amazing friend caused my sliding doors moment. A big group of friends all went on holiday together. A few friends of friends came along too. I hit it off with one of them but I was in a crappy mind set at the time where I was pushing nice men away for no real reason. My friend said to me “take a chance, he is a lovely guy, you both fancy each other, give it a go” I took the chance and we got together. The same friend spoke to my now DH and said something along the lines of you don’t know how lucky you are you have a chance with Bumfuzzled. Grab this opportunity with both hands as she is amazing. Neither of us were thinking anything serious until my friend talked to us. It switched something in both our brains. We’ve been together for nearly 20 years! He was and still is an amazing friend

Swiped left on tinder (or is it right?) and now dp and I have been together 7 years with an 18month old DD ❤️😂

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Early twenties, first house, first time using a old metal handled drill given to me. I drilled through an electrical cable and the shock threw me, unconscious, across the room.

But I survived.