Ask MetaFilter asks the question: Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child, which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?
Here are a few of the responses:
- I went to a slaughterhouse and decided to become a vegetarian.
- Wayne Arnold let me hold the trumpet he just got from school (I was in kindergarten) and at that moment, I knew that I would have to play. 32 years later, I still play.
- When I was seven, my father bought me a turntable and allowed me access to his record collection. 30 years and thousands of dollars in gear and recordings later, music is my passion.
- When I was 4, I had 2 fingers partially amputated in a lawnmower. Reach your own conclusions. heheh
- Age 14 - I watched my mom give birth to my little sister. I decided that I was never doing that, and I've been happily childfree ever since. Getting fixed this year, whoo!
- When I was 16, our house burned down while our family was away. We had spent the last 6 years building it. We lost essentially all of our possessions. I lost a stamp collection and an Atari 400 that I'd worked an entire summer to earn. My father lost negatives and equipment from a 20-year photography career.
Building the house taught me and my siblings what hard work was, how to face it and thrive in it. Losing it, and all our possessions, taught me that things are just objects, not the center or my life or cause for deep, abiding emotional attachments. - Moving to the US from Norway when I was 14. I was teased mercilessly in Norway and was an unpopular, ugly bookworm misfit whom nobody would ever ask out on a date. When I moved to NYC, everything changed - I got contacts, cut my hair and sprouted breasts, and because of my 'novelty value' and accent, I became the most sought-after girl in school. I went from the bottom of the barrel to the top of the world, and it changed everything.
- I was 13. I had my first babysitting job, and I took along a copy of Stephen King's "Pet Semetary" to entertain me after the kids went to sleep. I scared the everliving shit out of myself, but almost 20 years later, my first novel is a southern gothic horror that I hope some kid takes on her first babysitting job with her.
- Was about three, and enraged by the sight of some guy in a red suit, coming out of Sears, and foisting on the public the notion that he flew around the world delivering presents on a train of reindeers. Subsequently became lifelong skeptic.
