A Sister’s Intervention and Threads of Fate
I don’t usually write stories like this, but this one is personal.
I was a young student, studying natural sciences, a field I never truly liked. In fact, I hated it. But I had chosen that path simply because my best friends had, and I didn’t know any better. I was miserable. Except for mathematics and physics, I struggled with every subject. I felt trapped, dragging myself through classes that drained me.
Then one day, my sister – who was studying psychology in Tehran – came to visit. I didn’t know it then, but as it turns out, the conversation I had with her that day was a turning point in my life.
I remember sitting alone in my room when she knocked on the door.
“You look sad,” she said. She was always right when it came to my feelings.
I told her everything – how much I hated natural sciences, how I felt stuck, how I wished I could change my field.
“So why don’t you?” she asked.
“I tried,” I told her. “The principal said it’s not possible. There was a deadline, and I missed it. It’s too late now.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” she said. And then she left.
An hour later, she returned with a smile.
“It’s done.”
“What do you mean?”
“I changed your field. You’re in Computer Science now.”
Just like that, everything shifted. I had no idea that a few signatures and a bit of determination were all it took to rewrite my future.
And that’s when I fell in love with programming. Mr. Mirnejad, our teacher, introduced us to QBasic, and later, Pascal. But soon, it became my world. I can still picture my younger self sitting in that small room, glued to my computer, typing line after line of code in Pascal. Those old programs are probably still buried somewhere in the hard drives of my Pentium 4 PC – the same childhood computer my parents have kept untouched, like a shrine to the boy I once was.
I remember the first time I showed my DOS-based application to my cousins. They lined up eagerly, taking turns trying it out. I remember the thrill of winning the national programming contest, representing my school, feeling for the first time like I had found where I belonged.
None of these moments would have happened if my sister hadn’t visited that day.
Sometimes I wonder – what if she hadn’t? What if we never had that conversation?
Would I still be trapped in a life I didn’t choose? Would I be a different person, living a different story?
But the truth is, I will never know.
All I know is that one small act changed everything. And sometimes, that’s all it takes – one conversation, one person who believes in you, one moment that turns the tide of your entire life.
And if she hadn’t knocked on my door that day?
I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be me.
