What a Twist
This is part of my experiment to write regularly and publish every day with the help of 365 Days of Writing Prompts. Today’s prompt: “Tell us a story — fiction or non-fiction — with a twist we can’t see coming.”
I do not have a story with a twist, even though I have tried for at least a week to come up with one. Instead, I am going to write about the twists (or the lack of them when I need them) in my life.
A lot of movies are about how some pleasant surprises thrust people to reach their dreams. I am not going to say which ones, but you probably have seen a number of these. See, sometimes I hope to succeed at something. I pay the dues and put in the hard work. Then a twist should happen to change things from ordinary or extraordinary, from waiting to succeeding. That is how it works, right? Unfortunately, it rarely works that way.
Several years ago, I gave my very first conference presentation. It was months of hard work. I traveled to the other side of the country for it. I felt that I gave it all. The presentation itself was not great, mainly because I felt that I was not a good speaker. The material was sort of niche, and it did not help that I probably presented it in a dry way. I was glad that it was done and over, but I was not happy at all about how it went. But some weeks later, my supervisor told me that one of the professors in charge of the project called him in excitement. It turned out that a person at another organization was interested in my talk. He could not attend, but he downloaded my slides and talked to his colleagues, who was in charge of a similar project to ours. We exchanged e-mails. The professors talked to them some more. I was excited too because I really hoped that some sort of collaboration would be made between the two projects. Sometime later, though, I learned that it did not work out. Oh well.
A year later, I went to the conference again, This time, I was not a speaker. I was just an attendee who was asked by their supervisor to talk to a lot of people. I met another attendee who was the director of a pretty well-known project in the field. We talked about what we did in our respective projects. On the last day of the conference. I took an inter-city train home. Guess what? I met that person again. He lived far away and would have taken a flight back. However, he was visiting family before heading back. Therefore, he took the train. What a coincidence! Since we were an hour away from our destinations and I had not shown him my project yet, I took the opportunity to do just that. The WiFi Internet connection on the train was spotty, and I did not have a fast mobile data connection either. Fortunately, I remembered that I had some screenshots saved in my offline-viewable notebook in Evernote. I showed him the screenshots while describing how my project worked. We also exchanged contact information. At that time, I had in my mind some sort of data exchange between the two projects, which I told him about. Since their project had tons of storage space, I thought we would be a very good match. Several days later, the person wrote back. The good news was that he remembered me and took the time to follow-up, which I appreciated. The bad news was that he talked to his colleague, and the collaboration was not going to work out in this case either.
This and several other examples have taught me that twists are hard. Good write make them seem easy, but I am not one of them. I am not good at soaring to success with twists that I need in my life either. I am still trying, though. I am keeping myself prepared and keeping my hopes up, so that when a twist happens, I will be ready.
