My understanding is that if you own 1 bitcoin when a fork happens, you will then own 1 of each coin in the fork. Most likely one will survive and the other will fail (or become almost worthless). You'll end up with 1 of the successful fork so no harm done. If anyone can clarify that, please do so.
"A softfork is a change to the bitcoin protocol wherein only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. Since old nodes will recognise the new blocks as valid, a softfork is backward-compatible. This kind of fork requires only a majority of the miners upgrading to enforce the new rules." Bitcoin Wiki
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/SoftforkIf the SegWit2x option win then there won't be any hard fork until later this year, only then we will have 2 MB hard fork.
Bitcoin upgrade is something new and unique and there is no way to tell how people will react when it will finally happen, even if there won't be any technical issues linked to it.