When you hear someone say, "As a child, I dreamed I'd become..."

Did you have that experience as a child where you knew early on, you were going to become something, or go in a certain direction.

I didn't. I'm wondering how common the experience is though.

If not, what age did you know? Was it a sudden, "aha" experience, or less or more than that even?

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001

Answers

Judging by all the responses, I'd say everyone's still figuring it out.

As for me, I still have NO idea what I want to be. All I hope for is to make it in a field which I enjoy that will give me time and the funds to do what I love.

-- Anonymous, June 04, 2001

I wanted to be a pony, a princess and a barbarian warlord. Later, I wanted to be a fireperson, a famous veternarian, or an astronaut. Still later, it was an english teacher, a book editor, or a writer.

Funny how your reach sort of narrows, the older you get.

Nowawadays I want to have no bills, and be happy doing something. I want to be left alone to write in a cold little attic with a hot plate and a stack of ramen noodles. I want a trust fund, and an island, and hordes of synchophants. I don't know what I want.

The aha! experience showed up when I was sitting at a desk one day, after graduating from college, and realized that, more than anything, what I really, really didn't want was to be 35 and thinking "wow, 20 years from now, I can retire!"

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

As a child I dreamed of being a foreign missionary. I had these very developed fantasies about living in exotic locales, and being heroic in extreme circumstances, and so on. I found a lot of very romantic books published in the '40s and '50s, written by priests who had served in China and the early USSR. I recall one priest's story about working in eastern China and singlehandedly (or so he said) shepherding a bunch of refugees away from the battlefields of World War II into relative safety in the West. I guess I'd call those books propaganda if I read them now, but at the time they really captured my imagination.

Of course, during the six years that I studied for the priesthood, I discovered that the life is much less about carrying orphans through flooding Chinese rivers and much more about taking Mrs. McGillicuddy's 3 a.m. call to complain that her son who just moved back in is being unpleasant to the cat again.

If I had an "aha" moment it was in my fifth year, when I was living in a parish in southern Maine and realized that I really wasn't cut out for that stuff after all. And, in hindsight, I probably wouldn't have been cut out for a life of slogging through swollen rivers with orphans in tow, either.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

When I was very very young I remember the usual things like wanting to be a ballerina but only because I loved the outfit. My most favorite thing to do as a kid was to rearrange my bedroom. Furniture, books, even where things were placed on my shelves. I would sometimes do this twice a week. My mom used to tease me and say I was going to be a gypsy or an interior decorator. I also used to draw pictures of the different rooms I wanted to have in my house and plan the color schemes. I'd draw my own furniture and even painted my own art work. I never planned it as a carreer though. It never even crossed my mind. I was practical even at 10. That's probably the closest I ever came to dreaming of becoming something as a child though.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

There were a lot of things I wanted to grow up and do - travel around the world, see unusual things, learn and teach, make a difference, etc. - but nothing I really wanted to be, no job title that I had as my goal, although there were some, like housewife, that I specifically wished to avoid, and there were some that appeared to involve cool clothes, like BOAC stewardess. The pattern has persisted. I'm more interested in the tasks than the role, and although I think that's psychologically healthier and more mature ("I'm me and I love to write" vs. "I want to be a 'writer' like my heroine Sylvia Plath, only I won't put my head in a gas oven, I'll work in my pajamas and get fan letters and respect"), it makes me sound like a dilettante compared to all the people who knew they wanted to be surgeons from the time they were six years old. I'm terribly jealous of those people.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

I don't recall having anything I wanted to "be" when I grew up. In fact, I was graduating from college with a math major, certain only that I didn't want to be a math teacher or actuary (which are the only two things a math major directs you toward). I'm now having a mid-life pause, where I'm still trying to decide what to be when I grow up. I have these vague fantasies of detective, electrician, archeaologist, social worker.....I'm still not sure what I should be doing.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

I wanted to be a CEO in fourth grade. Then I wanted to be a writer or a poet. I didn't think about it for a long time. As an adult I got caught up in just trying to pay the bills. About a year ago I had a mini-"aha" though. I decided I wanted to try my hands at Software Engineering after an engineer I worked with said that I thought just like every Software Engineer he had ever known. It was a compliment I think. Now if I could just catch up on enough bills so that I can go back to school.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

"I want to be a 'writer' like my heroine Sylvia Plath, only I won't put my head in a gas oven, I'll work in my pajamas and get fan letters and respect"

There are worse reasons to be a writer. And this is not necessarily an immature approach to choosing writing as a career, though admittedly people attracted to the romance of the profession don't often have the dedication to face the reality of the struggle and the poverty and the likely obscurity all the attendant fun stuff that being a writer tends to entail.

I'm not sure why you're saying this approach or attraction to writing is 'immature', as if immature was a bad and terrible thing, is my point.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

My grasp of the interminable run-on sentence and the hazy turn of phrase, demonstrated with dazzling precision above, clearly signals that I am not, myself, cut out to be a writer when I grow up.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

I wanted to be a teacher. Then I found I hated teaching while I was doing student-teaching in college. Oops!

Then I owned a business, which I never thought I would do, and said I'd never be able to work for someone again.

But I am, and love what I do, except that I travel way too much.

Where I am now is never ever somewhere I thought I would be. I was poor white trailer trash, living in an upper lower-class neighborhood. I just wanted OUT.

Lisa

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

I had a dream. But being as my current situation of glorified secretary, putting my wife through law school, trying to minimize the massive student loan debt by working long hours, and hoping to have a 20% downpayment for a house in 18 months to get the tax write off... I choose my current state of repression to the possible depression that would surely follow if I -didn't- tell myself, in a monotonic, slightly Mr. Robot'ish, oath..."I'm doing exactly what I've always wanted to do."

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2001

"Why immature?" ... well, basically, because it focuses on the trappings of the job, which is the part a child would see, blocking out the tedious parts. Like wanting to be a doctor or a lawyer, let's say, because they look good on TV dramas, and ignoring the parts about dissecting cadavers and going through courtroom bureaucracy. If you also don't mind dissecting cadavers or going through courtroom bureaucracy, then it'll turn out fine, of course, but I've known a number of people who wasted years trying to be something they really only wanted to play on TV.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2001

When I was a child, I wanted to be an author and write novels. Later I wanted to be a librarian like the ones I knew.

By high school I wanted to be a jewelry designer.

It turned out I didn't have any ideas for novels, and going to library school required learning a couple of other languages (not for me). And I was too worried about stability to be any kid of artist, plus I didn't have the talent for schmoozing.

I think it's hard to figure out what you want to be when you grow up because we don't get much info about the day to dayness of jobs. Don't lawyers have the highest burnout rate? I'd guess some of that is that people think they're going to get to be perry mason and then they find out the job just involves doing research.

I ended up doing computer programming (my mom says this makes sense because I was always sort of anal about certain things, like the order of colors in my crayon box) and then a tech writer.

-- Anonymous, June 06, 2001

Did you have that experience as a child where you knew early on, you were going to become something, or go in a certain direction.

No way! Figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up has eluded me for most of my 36 years. Part of the reason is what was mentioned above--not knowing what the day-to-day stuff would be like in a given career. I've gone through "phases" where I wanted to be a writer (until I figured out that I lack SO much discipline, and that I'm not good with rejection;) a librarian (until I realized that there's an awful lot of clerical-type stuff involved in most librarian positions, a most emphatic downside for me;) a computer programmer (until I started living with one, listening to what he did all day, and realized that I just ain't that anal, thankyouverymuch.) Basically, I had lots of interests, but my many fine personal qualities (snicker) were getting in the way of a career choice.

After a completely directionless first few semesters in college, I finally took a career class early this year that used various exercises and tests to assess personality, interests and abilities. I finally figured out that I'm creative, a problem-solver, and what I like to do best is "fix" people and give advice. I finally settled on occupational therapy as a great career fit for me. My tests also indicated that I'm a highly artistically-oriented person, which is frustrating because I have no actual talent. I'm still trying to figure out how I could work artistic pursuits into my life.

-- Anonymous, June 08, 2001