Between watching Loki and What If…?, I’ve spent a bit of time considering significant choices in my life that would have altered where I am today. Unlike Marvel, I don’t know what my alternate timelines would have been, but I can certainly identify major decisions I made. I’m only considering actual decisions that I made, rather than my parents’ decisions in my youth or things outside my control.
When I started college, I intended to follow my undergraduate degree with law school. Over the years, I wavered on that, considering a graduate focus on international studies instead. Then I took more computer classes. And wrote up a resume for the first time, which included many computer skills. In my final undergraduate semester, I made the decision to take the GRE rather than the LSAT and apply for a graduate program in computers. Either would have been an interesting path.
As I finished graduate school, I interviewed with several companies on campus, and one flew me into the Chicago O’Hare airport just before Thanksgiving for an interview. If you’ve never flown into Chicago, it’s pretty amazing to see from the air how much green space there is because of the many forest preserves. Once on the ground, all I saw was the route to my hotel, from there to the interview (not far at all), and then back to the airport. But I flew home with a job offer and a reasonably good impression of the area. A couple months later, I was able to explore a little while selecting an apartment, and I’ve stayed in the Chicagoland area since then.
An important what if for me is what if I hadn’t gone to that first local gaming convention, so many years ago? Except I realized, that wasn’t the right what if. It was actually at GenCon that summer, when I kept returning to the Out of the Box Publishing booth to play Shipwrecked, even after I bought the game. One of those times, a couple playing with me handed me a flyer to a Thanksgiving weekend gaming convention. Attending that convention resulted in joining my current role-playing group, meeting my ex-husband, and most importantly, the eventual birth of my daughter. All because I enjoyed a game.