... on a boring highway.
Somewhere around 1989, when I was in my late 20s, I had returned to my boyfriend in Denver, after attending the University of Arizona's Racetrack Industry Program the prior few years. It wasn't in the plans for me to return -- he'd gotten married in the interim, and then separated... big mess.
Anyway, his brother's family lived close and so we had lots of get-togethers, mainly with going to the dog races, because both men were heavy gamblers. Then they decided that the four of us would drive to Las Vegas for a few days. The other three -- all in their late 30s to early 40s -- had been before. I hadn't. So, it was a fun thought to see Las Vegas for the first time. We'd practiced at playing Blackjack before the trip, which would be a day's drive. We women sat in the backseat behind our men.
We were on our way in my boyfriend's new Acura Legend, a very nice and pricey sedan. He'd installed a "fuzzbuster" that beeped if a cop had his radar gun on the car, and that's what a lot of the conversation centered around. At one point -- probably somewhere in Utah -- I looked at the back of my boyfriend's head, then looked at his brother next to him, and then glanced at his brother's wife next to me. I thought, What am I DOING here? I knew I didn't belong. I didn't even want to belong.
I then went into some kind of internal chatter about how "growing up" means that you just go with the flow of the people around you, and that anything you individually think or want isn't okay, unless it's part of that external flow.
I was fine about going to Las Vegas. I was fine about the company around me. But that's what the life of returning to my boyfriend had become... just fine. And I thought I should be satisfied with that. Never mind that I'd discovered fandom while in college and that was something wonderful and exciting and fulfilling... and therefore very naughty.
In retrospect, that little moment of awareness some forty years ago was probably one of the top ten most important moments of my life. It didn't prompt any action on my part at the time to change anything -- for starters, I couldn't even imagine how -- but it's given me a valuable reference point. Now, I do things that quietly please me or that excite me. I enjoy what I enjoy. I don't do things that merely feel fine or okay, for the sake of pleasing others. Life is so, so much better than it was back then, when I was incapable of believing that it was okay -- let alone fantastically wonderful -- that I was passionate about the things I was passionate about.
Back then, I settled for less than what life could be.