what did you want to be when you grew up, and what are you now?

[RNotteLovesOwls]

the title says it all. and for a further question, are you happy where you are?

when i was young, i didn't know what i wanted to be in the future. pretty sure that, like most kids, i put down something generic like "astronaut" when asked the question in an assignment. well, in high school, after really getting into minecraft, i envisioned myself as a video game developer, and went to community college to get a computer science degree. then, haflway through my first semester, i changed it to a degree in the arts, and went into university for a bachelor's degree in studio arts. now, i work as a freelance animator specializing in music videos, lyric videos, visuals, and cover arts. i'm shooting for setting up an LLC this year to make my work more "legitimate"

to answer the question on if i'm happy? i would say, for the most part, kinda? navigating adult life is pointlessly frustrating at times, but i'm trying my best. in hindsight, i'm glad i gave up on the compsci degree plan, because whew, is it a fraught time to work in the tech industry if you're not a rich, greedy techbro. i feel bad for everyone there... except the techbros

now it's your turn 

[ValyceNegative]

I wanted to be a detective. This is the earliest dream job I can remember, something I said I would do since elementary school. I don't know what exactly sparked the obsession but sure enough I know that I was already immersed in media such as Great Mouse Detective, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and so many animations/movies depicting noir hardboiled private eye stereotypes, be them parody or not. I still couldn't understand that wasn't the reality even for actual private investigators, but I'm frankly still fascinated with that world and that profession, so I guess that'll stick to my character forever xD

Growing up this fused with my love for journalism, so it became "I want to be an investigative reporter". In short, I still wanted the thrill of the adventure and I was fascinared with the idea of testing my wit against others to solve crimes and enigmas. Again, very idealized and detatched from reality, I know. But hey, I was a daydreaming kid xP

Sometime in early high school I started drawing... and I never stopped. I learned how to take commissions and how to build a business for myself by myself. I'm glad I did it in an era in which art sites and art forums were still thriving and I managed to create my own niche audience in that era. I wouldn't even know where to start now.
I would have loved to take more appropriate lessons for an art career but I'm also glad to have chosen Foreign Languages as specialization. I also attended a Tattoo school that dipped in art lessons, so there's a bit of that.

I guess that kid me would find my current profession cool even if I didn't end up being a trench coat-wearing, adventure-seeking hardboiled detective. Personally, I'm happy with what I do. I like to draw, I like to earn my living with drawings, and this life has lead me to meet my husband and build long term career plans with him. A lot of the stories we create for our comics are murder mystery and thriller, so I never really left my childhood turf xP

[Dan Q]

My answer is so boring.

When I was somewhere between six and eight years old, in the mid-1980s, when all of my friends wanted to be race car drivers or astronauts or firefighters... I decided that I wanted to be a computer programmer.

And then I just set up all of the rest of my career plan from there. I taught myself BASIC, then Assembly, then Pascal. At secondary school I focussed on maths, science, and IT. At college I leaned further into computing and maths, and taught myself Delphi and HTML. My first undergraduate degree at university was computer science with software engineering, alongside which I picked up Perl, PHP, JavaScript, and SQL. And before I'd graduated, I was working in the industry for a little startup. Seven-year-old me would have considered me to have self-actualised by 21.

So. Boring.

For a while I considered a "managed", pre-planned career change as a mid-life crisis. My second degree was in counselling and psychotherapy. My third was a masters in digital forensics. (I keep collecting degrees. I haven't yet worked out what I'm going to do with them.) But at 45 now I've probably missed the boat on that one, and that's okay: I still love software!

Software has always been magical to me because it's a place where you can build your own world with your own rules. Any kind of physical engineering is limited by the constraints of physics. That's not true (well, not to the same extent, yet!) in software engineering: we get to invent our own rules, our own worlds, our own limitations, and our own solutions. We can prototype quickly because code can be thrown-away and re-cycled indefinitely. Software's just magical.

So yeah: I'm living the dream version of myself 35 years ago. I'll never be a "tech millionare" or anything because my motivation's always been to give things away for free (or as cheap as possible). But I'm happy with my choices. Six-year-old me knew that he wanted to be a programmer so that he could play about with technology. Me-today is more-interested in using that technology to make the world a better place.

These dreams are compatible, I think.