Around the turn of the 20th century, controversial psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud first posited the existence of denial as a human defense mechanism. For example, we deny that the reason for our poor performance on an exam was our own lack of preparation; we believe instead that the questions were unfair. We deny that lax gun control laws affect the number of fatal shootings in America; we believe instead that these shootings are unpredictable outliers, impossible to prevent. Denial is what occurs when we are trying to protect ourselves from an unsavory reality, and it is also what writer Kathy Ritchie explores in her piece from The Moment, which details her mother’s difficult diagnosis with dementia. Watch and listen to her story here.

When I was eight-years-old, I was the only girl on my Little League team. For an entire year, I wore a dirty, backwards A’s cap to school every day. I spent recesses discussing the benefits of Mark McGwire becoming America’s next president with any of my male classmates who’d listen. I rarely smiled in public, refused to be dressed in anything “poofy,” and when my mother brought me home an issue of Girls’ Life Magazine, I returned it to her—I was not interested.

Call it being a tomboy, or call it plain, old-fashioned stubbornness. At eight, I believed that being labeled a “girly girl” would be the end of me. Many children (girls and boys) go through similar periods of figuring out exactly where they’re comfortable standing on the gender scale. To some it’s important, to others less so. But for former female firefighter turned writer Caroline Paul, proving tough in front of her male counterparts at the San Francisco Fire Department was the most worthwhile thing she could do—until her attitude almost got in the way of her job, a Moment she’d never forget. She narrates her story in this audio recording.

I met legendary Popular Science staff photographer John B. Carnett in 2006 while reporting a story on a Jetpack inventor in Cuernavaca, Mexico. We became friends, and years later as I started to put this book together I asked John to share one image and a few hundred words to reflect a moment that rocked his wild range of experiences. It’s no exaggeration to say that John has taken thousands of photographs of some of the most inventive people, places and things in the world. And yet John’s life-changing moment was about the photo he idn’t take. He narrates his story below.

When SMITH Magazine began collecting stories for The Moment, it was important to us to represent a vast array of writers from famous and experienced to obscure and never before published. Lucky for us though, Moments don’t happen strictly to writers– everyone has the capacity to take in and be affected by events in their lives. We were especially delighted to see Moments submitted in all sorts of forms (including illustrations, comics, photographs, hand-written letters and tweets, among others) that reflected the immense diversity within the SMITH creative community.

Nadja Cada is not only a writer and The Moment contributor, but also a student in New Media at Ryerson University’s School for Visual Studies, where her instructor, Ramona Pringle, assigned students to recall a life-changing moment in multimedia form. Here, you can listen to Nadja reading her story, “Just a Man” (published in The Moment) about discovering a letter from her biological father when she was thirteen.

Nadja Cada - “Just a Man”

What’s great is that Nadja used her skills as a media artist to take her Moment tale even further. She created a piece of video art showcasing her father’s actual letter, which you can watch below.

“My wife was ready to have a baby. I was not. Sure, I supported the idea in a vague, abstract way–I wanted to have kids just as I wanted to retire to a house on a lake. Someday.”

Recently, Obamacare’s preventive care mandate has reignited major controversy over female reproductive rights. It really wasn’t all that long ago when active family planning was more of a dream than a reality for Americans (Griswold v. Connecticut—the landmark case that upheld the right to martial privacy—wasn’t until 1965!) Perhaps because of this struggle, modern tales about adults waiting until just the right moment to have children are common. We hear fewer about children who come as surprises to their parents and whose births are unexpected. But as Michael Forster Rothbart explains in his piece for The Moment, sometimes children just happen, and sometimes that turns out just fine, too.

Watch “Someday: One Father’s Story” by Michael Forster Rothbart here.

What is somewhat magical (and also frustrating!) about the events that affect the paths of our lives is that they are impossible to predict. Sometimes we don’t even know they’ve passed until years later. When we’re young, this can be hard to imagine. Growing up, many of us are molded to believe that careful planning will guarantee achievement, success and ultimately happiness. In high school, counselors encourage extracurricular activities that will increase our chances of getting accepted into college. In college, we are expected to declare a major that will lead to the right internship, which will in turn land us that first perfect job after graduation. We are told to calculate the exact trajectories of our futures again and again.

But life doesn’t always work that way. Looking back, journalists Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson never predicted that one random assignment for The Sacramento Bee would dictate the rest of their lives. When the two young men hopped on the back of a freight train for a story in the 1980s, they had no idea that this was their Moment, the event that would singularly shape both themselves and their careers. In fact, if you’d asked them back then what their life-changing Moment was they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you—which reminds me, have you had your Moment yet? Share yours on The Moment project.

Since its release earlier this year, we’ve heard from readers across the world that The Moment is a book that people snuggle up with in bed, taking in a few “moments” a night. At the same time, one of the most unexpected pleasures is just how these stories have come alive at the events we’ve had across the country. At SMITH Magazine’s The Moment reading at Gallery at The Bootleg in Los Angeles, storyteller, musician and performance artist Richard Ferguson captivated the crowd with his reading of “Crying for Their Dog.” Here he reads it accompanied by an original score.