Have you ever experienced a "defining moment" in your life?

I think of it as an epiphany: it was when I decided I would really be able to live after my husband’s death. It was a sense of tremendous joy about the beauty of the world (I was in Greece, sitting on a old high ruin, between the cove where I was swimming every day and a stretch of orange groves and pomegranate groves and mountains), about a year after he died. It was a defining moment.

I had a sort of defining moment in my life. I had been using a lot of sleeping pills to sleep. I was taking an amazing overdose every night just to sleep (it took 17 pills to knock me down the reccomended dose is 1 or 2). Then one night after 5ish months of doing this I started getting really sick. I threw up a few times then went to lay down feeling very naseaus and miserable. Then the defining moment, I forgot how to breath. It sounds like the most retarded thing in the world to forget, but I did. I was so scared, I just couldn’t figure out how to get oxygen into my lungs. I haven’t touched any pills (street, recreational, perscription, or OTC) since. Even tylanol. The sight of them makes me sick.

The birth of my daughter was the most defining moment of my life. It’s 24 years later, and I still feel the awe of that miracle.

Sex.

I had a very defining moment, that clearly split my life into a distinct “before” and “after” – my parents died. I was 20, my brother was 16. For better and worse, nothing will ever be the same.

Middle school. Before it sucked, now it’s even worse :)

Seriously: I don’t think I had a “defining moment” yet.

There have been big moments, achievements, changes, etc. But, big enough to divide my life in to before and after, I can’t say I’ve had. They’re more like milestones. The biggest ones so far:

Finishing school
Moving abroad
Getting married

There’s this period where I can clearly talk about “before” and “after”, but it’s not really a moment as in “snap”.

Anyway, it’s when my mother’s ex left a little more than a year ago. About a year later I can notice how extremely much I have changed, how many new people I have met, how much more outgoing I have become. I’m really not the same person I was a year and a half ago.

@nocountry2 I’m so sorry for your loss. That must have been an extremely hard time for you.

When joined the military I went from an irresponsible innocent child to a worldly survivor.