Twelve questions that find the turning points
Twelve prompts that find the moments where your direction changed, each one answerable out loud in about a minute.
How to use these
Asked to write about your life, it is natural to start at the beginning, get as far as your schooling, and stop. These twelve questions start somewhere better: at the points where your direction changed, at work, at home, and in what you believed.
Take one. Answer it out loud, into your phone, as though you were telling somebody who has never met you. A minute is enough. Add the picture if you have one. Then leave the rest for another day.
1. The decision you would make again
Not the best thing that ever happened to you. A decision you made, knowing it might not work, that you would make the same way today. Say what the other option was, because the choice only makes sense next to the thing you turned down.
2. The day the plan changed
There was a plan. Then there was a phone call, a letter, a conversation in a corridor, and the plan was finished. Say what the plan had been, and what you did in the first week afterwards.
3. What you stopped believing
Something you were certain of at twenty-five and no longer hold. About work, money, religion, politics, or how people behave. Say what you believed, and what moved you off it, even if what moved you was slow and had no single day attached.
4. The person who changed your direction
One person. A teacher, a foreman, a neighbor, someone you knew for six weeks. Say what they actually did or said, in their words if you can still hear them, and where you would have ended up without it.
5. The job you took, and the one you left
Both halves matter. Say why you took it, whether the money or the fear or the person who asked, and say what leaving cost you. Nobody in the family knows the leaving part.
6. The first thing you were good at
Before the career, before the qualifications. The thing you found you could do while other people found it hard. Say how you discovered it, and whether you ever got paid for it.
7. The advice you did not take
Somebody sensible told you not to. You did it anyway. Say who they were, what they said, and be honest about whether they turned out to be right.
8. What you were afraid of and did anyway
A room you walked into, a letter you mailed, a question you asked out loud. Say what you thought was going to happen, and what actually did.
9. The place that was yours
A house, a workshop, a stretch of road, a corner of a factory. Describe what it smelled like and what was on the walls, then say why you stopped going there.
10. What you changed your mind about, and who changed it
Different from question three. This one is about a person, not a slow drift. Say what you thought of a group, an idea, or somebody in particular, and what happened that made you rethink it.
11. Something you made
A wall, a meal, a business, a repair, a piece of music, a child's costume at eleven at night. Say what it took out of you, and whether any of it still exists.
12. What you would tell yourself at twenty
Keep it to one thing. Not general advice, which reads the same from everybody. The specific warning or the specific reassurance you would give the person you actually were, about the thing that was actually coming.
After you answer
Each answer becomes a moment on your Life Line, with a date and a picture if you have one. Twelve of these and a stranger can already see the shape of a life: what you chose, what chose you, and what you came to think about it.
You do not have to do them in order, and you do not have to do them all. One a week for three months and you are finished.