What do you want to be when you grow up? A question that once incited me with wonder and possibility now meets me with dread and anxiety. As a child, the answers came easily, with each dream seeming attainable in the limitless imagination of an eight-year-old. Throughout my life, these answers have shifted from author to actress to fashion designer to teacher to lawyer — even an FBI analyst in the BAU. Each phase of my life brought new hopes and dreams, often inspired by a favorite TV show, a book, or simply the world changing around me.
As we grow up, the creative freedom in our answers begins to fade. Reality sets in, and suddenly, dreams once filled with wonder and possibility now focus on practicality and profitability. If you had told ten-year-old me—who wanted to be an author or fashion designer—that I’d one day be majoring in finance, I would have stared at you in complete disbelief. I never even began to excel or understand mathematics until I began taking precalculus and calculus courses. Majoring in finance doesn’t make any sense, and that’s the point. You are not supposed to know what you want to do for the rest of your life at age 10, or even at 18, when you are expected to have a career path laid out in front of you. Life is not linear, and the path you take will often twist and shift with time.
What comforts me is seeing how others have navigated this uncertainty. Take some of our favorite TV shows – Friends and Sex and the City. Friends follows twenty-somethings trying to figure out their lives. Rachel starts off aiming to be a trophy wife for a dentist, but at the end of the series, she is offered a high-profile position at Louis Vuitton in Paris. Who would have predicted that? In Sex and the City, we meet Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte, who are in their thirties and still questioning their current life trajectories. I also found solace in the novel Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, who openly shares the chaos of her twenties, hopping from job to job and dealing with hard life decisions, and now she’s a best-selling author. Even icons like Vera Wang didn’t enter the fashion world until her 40s, and Van Gogh did not begin painting until his late 20s. These life stories remind me that there is no concrete deadline to discovering your life passion or finding success. Instead, it shows us that our lives can be filled with chaos and uncertainty, but that does not mean our future will be bleak.
Whenever I am asked the infamous question of what I want to be when I grow up, I answer with a general idea. I want to work within the field of finance using my analytical skills, ideally in a global aspect, whether that be abroad or with the opportunity to travel. I also want to be able to use my creative writing skills. I have yet to find a job description that checks all of those boxes, but I am leaving the door open to new possibilities. While this answer may seem vague and noncommittal, it is one I have ruminated over time after time, and it is constantly evolving.
It is comforting to realize that many successful people did not find their true passion until later in life. Not knowing does not mean that you are lost or you are behind, but rather that you are on the path to discovery. I firmly believe in the phrase: “Everything happens for a reason”, so every decision you make matters. Try not to see this as something daunting or anxiety-inducing but rather an opportunity. It is a chance to explore, to test out the waters, and to dream with wonder and possibility again. It could mean that the best possible life might be one you haven’t imagined yet.