THE Monumental Event in John’s Life

After a great deal of thought, I believe that the event that has shaped my life the most dramatically is my decision, at the age of 14, to join an off-topic discussion forum made up of fellow Americans and others from many other countries like Spain, England, Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia. As trivial as this may sound, it was my first experience with people not from my immediate geographical area and it helped to open my eyes to the world around me. Age probably had something to do with it, as I was young and impressionable, but I maintain that my interest in other countries and other people came as a direct result of joining Outside Discussions. The people I spoke with there often held very different opinions from those people I spoke with in the course of daily life, and I was curious as to why this was the case. Just why this happened to be the case was not obvious at the time, and I distinctly remember my shock once at hearing someone talk about the government discussing trying to ban or limit something that we in the US took completely for granted. Exactly what it was is unimportant (and convenient, since I can’t quite remember what it was just now anyway…) but the shock I felt remains clear. Didn’t they have that particular right guaranteed them as a matter of course? Apparently not. It’s been a long process, and this June I’ll have been a member for five full years, but over that time my eyes have been opened much wider as regards the world outside of the United States of America (and also within, in other regions I’ve never visited). Joining that forum is what helped to spark my interest at traveling overseas- realizing that there were people like me across the Atlantic and the Pacific, down in South America, and even just on the other side of North America too. I’ve become such good friends with some of my fellow forummers there that I’ve even gone out of my way to physically meet some of them during my travels to places like Ireland and Spain. In short, there existed John’s world BEFORE discovering Outside Discussions, which was small and local, and then there was John’s world AFTER discovering Outside Discussions, a much, much bigger place than I could have previously imagined, and filled with an even greater number of fascinating people than I would have thought possible a few years before.

- John Alulis