10 Moments, 7 Choices and 5 People

The Prologue to the Prologue

I hardly watch Dr. Phil (though terribly entertaining, I find it to be somewhat demoralizing). I want to hear about small-town teenager Caitlyn and mother Susan's journeys as a sugar baby team just as much as the next guy, but a little piece of me always forces myself to stop just before the lie detector comes out (that's usually my cue on the Maury show too). However, in some fated moment of weakness the summer before I left to college, as I "tried" to change the channel that late Thursday evening (aka Friday morning), I found myself honed in on something the doctor was saying: "In every person's life, there are 10 moments that define their path, 7 choices that are critical to their being and 5 people that are pivotal to who they are". So as any inspired, partly delusional individual would at 3 a.m., I opened an abused moleskin journal and began compiling my own list. To my discontent, after hours of sitting criss cross apple sauce in that old kitchen chair, I was quickly confronted with a problem: how could I, only having lived 18 years, assume my life changing moments, choices and people were already a part of my past? So once again, after semi-psychotically pacing around the 15x10 kitchen, I again sat down in that old kitchen chair...but now with a good idea.
               In all good cinema and literature, the audience is presented with a number of chronological events that lead up to a turning point. Now, let me warn you: what makes my story so particularly enthralling is not the characters I met during my time on the Mediterranean Sea, or the anecdote of the night we were followed by a clown; it's not in the heart racing, sparks flying moments I shared with Jeff Tooker for weeks in a hospital, or the the lifestyle of a teenager living in Miami; it's not in the number of inexplicable spiritual experiences I have yet to fully understand, or the time a world renown artist ubered us home, or even being crowned my high school's version of prom queen (if you're ashamed that you're impressed, don't worry, so am I); what makes my story so particularly interesting is the way in which I choose to tell it: as the prologue to a carefully chosen turning point of which has yet to happen. In some ironic turn of events, I find myself captivated by the idea of publishing my own life in a potentially revealing series of events (unfortunately inspired by a heavily scripted and partially demoralizing tv show). Taking the last nineteen years and the next two, I will record my experiences, past, present and future, in order to compile a list of the 10 moments, 7 choices and 5 people that brought me to who I was, am and will be, assuming my life were to end in the year 2020 (Knock on wood). Names and organizations have been cleverly altered, but every other minute detail is nothing but the truth (for better or for worse).
That being said...
Dear reader, welcome to the past: A Painfully Long but Equally Enthralling Prologue to the Year 2020