“Hi honey, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Listen! When I was younger, I strived to have a lot of unique and farfetched occupations. At one point I wanted to be a writer for about two months. After that, I wanted to be an actress for about two years. Then I wanted to be a comedian, and then I realized I could do that on an everyday basis.
What I am trying to get at here is that I wanted to achieve so many great things until they were shut down by higher powers. By higher powers I do not mean God; I mean people like my realistic teachers and random friends of my parents who always wanted to ask me when I was younger, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
When I was younger, I thought of this as an amazing question, and I could be so optimistic about what I wanted to be. Hell, I could say I wanted to live on the moon and have tea parties with dogs, and they would just giggle as old folks do. But they would never shut down my extravagant occupation.
As I grow older, when people ask me this same question I am terrified to answer because I know that the response I get will be so realistic and dull. I know I am still young-ish so I have a far way to go, but I had a realization just a few months ago that changed the way that I think about the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
You see, I want to be something that is realistic so that I can make money and be a part of the, “real world.” However, this does not mean that I can’t be the writer, the actress and the comedian that I have always wanted to be. I can do those things and be as great as I possibly can. I can still do these things and have a stable occupation.
A few months ago I joined Odyssey, which tagged me as a writer. This made me very happy to share and create things like how I used to read my stories to my classmates when I was younger. A few months ago, I started filming and creating videos, which tagged me slightly as an actress. This made me even more happy because I got to bring joy to others by performing just like I did when I was in middle school and I did all of the school plays.
What made me even happier was that I wasn’t doing these things to get famous or get people to notice me, but I was purely doing them for myself, to make myself happy. Other people just tended to tremble along past them and take a look, which I didn’t mind. Don't be scared of this question because you can be whatever you want, and no, you don’t have to make money doing it.
