Face to Face!

So, I found this blog, Sunday Scribblings, which posts a writing prompt question every Sunday.  It seems like a really cool idea and it would keep me from being as monotonous as I've been on other places.  I'm going to be doing this every Sunday on top of whatever else I land up writing about.

Today's prompt is this:

"Who else might I have been?"

You can take this prompt in several ways. My first thought was: "If I was born in Palestine/Sudan/Siberia/etc... to a farmer/refugee/seal hunter/etc... who might I have been?" Suppose that everything that is essentially YOU as far as the nature part of it goes was the same, only the nurture was very different. Think for a moment about how the circumstances of your life have shaped who you are, and then mentally rearrange those circumstances. How about if you were an heir or heiress? Could you have avoided becoming Paris Hilton and maintained some sliver of a soul?

OR... Has there been a dramatic crossroads in your life? A road not taken? If you had taken a left turn instead of a right that day back in 1980... might your whole life had turned out differently?

OR... ruminate on your past lives.

OR... go wherever else your imagination leads you when you ponder: Who else might I have been?

***
The power of the question hits me hard as I just wrote something very much like it only about an hour before.  What if I hadn't done some of the things I did when I was younger?  Would I be any different?  Would I be in the exact same location?  Would my personality be the same?  How I show myself?  My social skills?  The power of this question is immense, but that's just me being repetitive and avoiding actually answering the question at hand.

So, could I be anyone other than me?  I think that given my inborn personality traits, I would think that my happiness would be most effected.  I've always had a very strong internal compass which I've followed.  It's brought me through hardship and good times.  It's my thermometer for my life and I don't know what I'd do without it.  I'm like a Canada goose; I have an internal compass which guides me in my migration north every summer.

If my internal compass was taken away from me, then I don't I would be myself, let alone different from me.  I would be lost in a sea of moralistic decisions with no gauge as to what is right and what isn't.  It's never been an outside imposed moral code for me; it's always been internalized.

I think this question might be best suited for someone who's made some major life-altering decisions.  Someone who has made career choices and family choices.  I've had it very easy and so this question strikes me as difficult to answer in a lot of ways.

I've often thought about what I would be like if I had chosen not to go to Framingham.  Would I have fallen into a similar group of friends and changed the way I have?  Would I be with a different group of people and have changed into something else?  Would I be a fashion conscious, yet free-willed breaker of social norms?

The persistent voice inside my says that I probably would because I attract those people to me and, as a result, would probably meet similar people to those I know now somewhere else.  But, would them being similar and not the same mean I would be different somehow?  Would the combination cause a different chain of events to occur inside me to result in me evolving in a slightly different direction?

I see myself right now in a place where I really can't evaluate it because, in the tributary map of my life, I'm at the source of the river and so I have no idea which direction I will actually flow.  I know I'm going to go downhill, but aside from that I'm very clueless.

At this point in my life, I think that if I had made any decision differently, I would be essentially the same person with very minor differences.  Those things which has majorly shaped me have not been my decision but things that have been given to me -- deaths, accidents and the like.

That which I cannot control has shaped me the most up to this point in my life.  I wish I could answer this question with some sort of clarity or insight.