What Should I Be When I Grow Up?

Put the question to a room of small children and watch what comes back. Superheroes. Dragons. Pop stars. Kids who want to drive the biggest trucks and dig with the biggest machines. Somewhere in the mix there's usually a child who announces, calmly, that they'll be a hairdresser or a teacher. At that age the picture is vivid. You can feel yourself flying, or waving at the crowd from a gold carriage, and it never occurs to you that it might not happen. One kid is going to rescue dolphins. Another is going to cure every illness there is. The future self a child imagines runs on pure idealism and a confidence that borders on absurd.

Then life starts correcting us, one small disappointment at a time. Santa turns out to be a story. Capes don't lift anyone off the ground. The tooth fairy was Mom all along. The sense of being unstoppable wears thin as we bump into our actual limits. The kid who was going to be a pop star can't hold a tune. The one who wanted to fly planes needs glasses. The girl who planned to rule England is growing up in a trailer in Alabama.

We figure out that the world is tougher than we had any way of knowing, and that plenty of wishes simply go unanswered. Rent comes due. Groceries have to be paid for. The idealism gets pushed to the back while we keep a roof overhead and food on the table. Eventually most of us file those early dreams under childish nonsense and move on.

But I'm not sure that's the right place to file them. Set the practical stuff aside for a minute and think back to what you actually wanted as a kid. The specific dream may be long gone. The reason it showed up in you in the first place is a different matter, and that reason is worth digging into.

Here is the thread to pull on: a child's wish is a desire in its rawest form, before the adult world layered logistics and caution on top of it. Being a princess may hold no appeal for you now, but the pull underneath it, wanting to feel important and beautiful and singular, hasn't expired. The jungle explorer isn't practical, yet the wish spoke of wanting to break new ground, to go where few people have gone. Driving a train or a truck means holding real responsibility in your hands. A hairdresser works to make people feel good about themselves. The superhero wants to stand between the world and whatever's trying to wreck it.

There were other impulses too, softer ones. Maybe you pleaded with your parents to let you nurse a dying bird, or to keep the stray cat you found on the sidewalk. A lot of children feel something sharp for the homeless, for kids who've been orphaned or left behind. That urge to help might still be alive in you, or you might have let it go after learning how hard it is to shift anything real in the world. Either way, it was there once, breathing. And it was that wish to matter to someone else that let us dream on such a scale.

Compassion was the engine. So bring it back. Dust off the care you had for the world and the appetite for improving it. You're actually better placed now than you were then, because you've got years of experience to work with. The idealism can stay fierce while planning and judgment keep it on the rails. Some days the dream will look flat impossible. The world still needs people willing to aim high. There are millions who, through illness, poverty, hunger, violence and war, never get the chance to chase a dream or even to form one. Your own circumstances may be rough, and still you can reach for whatever help and resources sit within arm's length and put your talents to some use that counts. The children who come after us are depending on the ones here now to keep believing.

You can still be a superhero if you let the word be a metaphor. No cape will carry you into the sky and no webbing will shoot from your wrists, but every one of us is carrying some mix of skill and capacity and resources that can be turned toward everyone's good. Think about how a superhero works: there's the ordinary public face, and the real identity kept quiet. We look plain on the surface while something stronger sits underneath. And like the superhero, we don't wave that strength around or spend it on ourselves alone. It waits, dormant, until it's called on to lift all of us, our own selves included.

That kind of quiet, settled power, the sort that doesn't need an audience, only shows up when you're being exactly who you are. One way back to it is to take the dreams of your younger self seriously again, the ones formed before the weight of the world landed. Honor those, and the power comes back with them, ready to be spent right here, on making things a little better. - Imani

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