Stories Along The Way

1992 was supposed to be an amazing year.

I was going to graduate from high school. I was already a nursing assistant and a medical assistant, and I was planning to start college the following year. I had plans. I had dreams. I thought I knew where my life was headed.

I had already experienced difficult things growing up. My father died when I was three, and as a child, I spent four years away from my mother. Those experiences were painful and shaped me, but they were not what I consider my before and after.

In May of 1992, my childhood on-and-off boyfriend proposed to me. I said no because I thought I was too young. At the time, I believed I was making the right decision.

After what happened in December, though, I regretted saying no for a long time. I often wondered if I had said yes, maybe I would have felt like I had someone beside me—someone to lean on when my world suddenly felt so different.

I’ll never know how life would have turned out if I had said yes. But even that decision wasn’t my before and after.

Despite the difficult things I had already experienced, I was still me. My life wasn’t luxurious, but I had everything I needed. More importantly, I was happy. I loved to dance, dreamed about my future, and believed I knew where my life was headed.

Then December 20, 1992 came.

A traumatic event happened that changed the course of my life.

There was the girl before—happy, dancing, dreaming, and looking forward to her future.

And then there was the girl after—afraid of life, with little confidence, trying to survive and making choices the girl I had been before never imagined making.

That was my before and after.

More than three decades later, I can still see that invisible line running through my life. I know exactly who I was on one side of it, and I know who I became on the other.

I wonder how many other people carry a date, a moment, or an event like that with them. Our stories may be completely different, but maybe we understand each other in one way: sometimes life changes so suddenly that we measure time by who we were before and who we became after.

Do you have a before and after?