When I grow up

For those of you who were hoping this would be an in-depth analysis of the song “When I grow up” by the Pussycat Dolls I am sorry to disappoint you – there will be another place and time to debate whether or not they say “boobies” or “groupies.”

This is about the seemingly endless question, “what do you want to be when you grow up.” As a small child this question seems to be a relatively practical inquiry. As soon as we had the ability to form sentences “grown ups” have been posing this question. I cannot vividly remember the first time I was asked this question but know that the answer likely changed dramatically from year to year and even day to day at some points. This is my assumption based purely on the rapidly changing answers I would get from Adrie and Jaiden the summer I watched them. On Monday Adrie wanted to be a garbage man, Tuesday she wanted to be a social worker and most days she wanted to be a princess; Adrie was three at the time mind you. Fast forward a little over a year later and she has now decided she wants to be a doctor!

I can remember being asked this exact question in third grade while be taped by Ms. Luce; apparently I wanted to be a Marine biologist! Guaranteed I had no idea what a marine biologist did, but what I did know was that my best friend Essie wanted to be one so obviously I did as well. From that point on I threw around the idea of possibly being a teacher, a doctor, an actress, then a teacher again, a journalist, then thought seriously about just marrying a doctor instead of becoming one, at one point according to my dad I wanted to be a minister’s wife with twelve children, then I was going to be a business woman in New York and then an actress a couple more times. My point being that as children and even young adults our minds were constantly being stimulated by the world around us both immediately and at large – we were influenced by media, peers and family. But my question is does that cycle ever truly stop? If it was supposed to I think there may be something profoundly wrong with me, because it is a daily battle for me to decide what it is I want to be when I grow up and I will be 24 years old in less than a month! Not a day goes by when I don’t question what it is I really want to do with my life professionally and how I am going to get there.

Today I am proctoring the ACTs for the umpteenth time and I find myself pondering this question even deeper. When I walk into New Prague High School I immediately feel like I am worlds away from being 18 and at the same time I can literally see the locker banks full of my then classmates shuffling to class and muttering their plans for the weekend, like a mental snapshot. I am not sure that I was in one particular social class in high school, I basically got along with just about everyone but I was highly aware of the caste system that existed within the walls of New Prague High School and even more indefinitely the barriers of New Prague itself. I am grateful that I was lucky enough to be a member of the in crowd versus the latter because it was undoubtedly a long four years for those individuals. And while I have been removed from high school for more than five years now, I am amazed how easy it is for me to categorize the students in this room right now. A very small percentage of the overall population of this school sits before me and still there is the smart ass, a brainiack, a prom queen, a tom boy, a class clown, a cheerleader, an athlete and an outlier. Regardless of their social standing they all came here today as an investment in their future, a stepping to stone to what they want to be when they grow up.

The irony of it all is that I still want to be an actress, a doctor, a journalist, a mother, a business woman and a teacher and the beauty of it all is that I can essentially be all these things if I chose to define those professions in a way that accommodates my talents and my life. If I look at the list above it is the overwhelming characteristics of each that stand out to me and those are intangible goals which do not require a degree. I am a caretaker (doctor) and highly dramatic (actress) by nature and arguably genetically. I am a business woman in progress. I do not need a classroom to teach. I will be a mother some day in one capacity or another. And as you read these words I become a journalist. It may be cliché but you truly can be all you want to be in this life.

I know that this list is far from complete and I truly hope I never stop evolving. I never want to lose the desire to reach for the next rung on the ladder. When I grow up I want to be a continual work in progress, I want to love and be loved, I want to live a life full of meaning, I want to be happy.

What do you want to be when you grow up?