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

[Horsey Chobunso]

The answer to "what did you want to be when you grew up?" changed a lot for me as a kid, but the strongest one was being a professional musician.

I am currently working for a camera shop and getting more immersed in the photography world outside of a hobby. I've bounced around a lot, but none of my real jobs have ever been in the arts until now. I get to teach music as a volunteer, so I think younger me would be happy about that, but there is definitely a mental wall between me and getting to my childhood dreams. I'm starting to figure out new dreams as I get older.

[AbsurdPirate]

When I was a kid, I thought being a video game QA would be a dream job. I'm a software QA now and can say with 100% certainty that being a video game QA would just make me hate video games.

When I got a little older (early teens), I wanted to be a therapist. I ditched that dream because of the big promise of how well paying the tech industry was and how competitive companies were for talent. So, that's where I ended up. As you can see today, that dream was a big farce.

I work in tech and it kinda blows. I'm thankfully in a stable-enough company, but I'm not really happy with what I'm doing. So I went back to school to pursue my teenage ambition of becoming a therapist. I got my associate's degree a few months ago!

[ainoumi]

mine is a little funny...

as a child, i genuinely wanted to be a doctor. first a family doctor. then a paramedic. then a surgeon. it was around 5th grade when i realized, being a surgeon would mean i would basically have no social life. i would be working all the time in the operating room.

so, i decided i wanted to be an author. i was writing a lot at the time. i even had a novel in the works in 6th grade. but it never saw completion, due to me redoing it a lot. time went on, and in high school, i decided i wanted to be an actor. and then eventually, a voice actor. but one day during a class visit from my hometown's local art school, i decided i wanted to go into animation.

senior year of high school, i picked up coding. and i discovered that, hey! i wasn't too stupid to code. so why not do the thing i always thought was cool growing up... becoming a professional game developer! i even attempted college for it. ...unfortunately, that dream was crushed by someone i used to know. a couple someones, actually. and at that point, i wasn't sure what i'd do...

...until i picked up HTML/CSS one day. i was tinkering with a zonelets blog. and it sparked my passion for writing code again. so, upon re-enrolling into college, i did a semester of web development classes. HTML, CSS, and Javascript (i also did Japanese). i failed Javascript, but to be fair, i was not on ADHD medication yet and the class was structured not very intuitively. before i could finished my associates, i fell incredibly ill. and i could no longer return to college at that time.

as for what i seemingly have become NOW... maybe it'll be hilarious. maybe it'll make sense.

i'm a VTuber haha

i still do a ton of the other stuff previously mentioned, drawing, writing, etc. i still have a HUGE fascination with the human body and medical stuff. i just go about it as a goofy anime character now.

am i happy? to be honest, i am very happy! i dont make much money, i dont have a huge following, everything i do is NOT professional... but im happy. though, i am frankly privileged to be able to do this too, dont get me wrong. i currently live with my mom again, after escaping an abusive environment. and i dont really have bills to pay, just to contribute to housework and occasionally cover food when i can. i know that makes me extremely privileged, so that would probably also contribute to my happiness.

that said, im also disabled. so there isnt much i can do regarding traditional work these days. i have POTS, chronic pain and fatigue. im a diabetic. im also on the severe side of mental illness, in terms of diagnosis. even if i werent streaming, traditional work wouldnt be an option anyway.

i do my best, though. and thats more than enough for me.

[rain]

Uh, when I was a kid I really wanted to be a firefighter (for some reason! I have no idea now). or at one point, as an even tinier rain, a dolphin

And at the current moment I'm studying computer stuff.

I'd say that I'm pretty happy where I am at the moment. At least, I feel like in my current state of life I wouldn't be able to be a firefighter anyway, so.

[pencilz]

I always wanted to be an artist as a kid! Which I am now but I definitely don't make enough for it to be a full-time job.

[honeyontoast]

When I was very young (6ish I think?) I wanted to be a train driver. In fact all the kids in my primary school got interviewed and filmed, so my parents probably have a video of me saying I wanna be a train driver!

As I got a little older, 13-15, I wanted to be a doctor.

Then when I got bored of that, it was software developer. Went to uni to study computing, had a bit of a mental break and hated it, swore I'd never work with computers.

So then, around 20ish, I wanted to be a chef. Never cooked before in my life. Around the same time I considered lorry (i.e. truck for the 'mericans) driver. Can't reverse a hatchback, though.

So at 21 I was strapped for cash and took my first job working in a little independent shop. As the only member under the age of 50 I was given all the computer related jobs, basically became a one-man IT team, realised actually I love working with computers, changed jobs to work in an IT Support team, was there for a few years, then got chatting with the software dev team on the same floor as me, and joined them as a junior. A few years, a few hops around companies, and now I'm a senior software developer. Full-stack, but mostly .NET, and about to start working in Python!

Am I happy? There's ups and downs, but mostly it's good. A couple of years ago I actually took a career break and went to work on a horticultural plant nursery. Potted plants, drove tractors, and it was a lot of fun. I was bored out of my mind though and came back to software development.

[chamodon]

when i was very young i wanted to be an astronaut but then i learned about how much math is involved alongside the existence of black holes and that interest died very quickly >>
i'm jobless rn but i'm in uni to be a professional animator, which ive wanted to be since i was young, about 8 years old ish i would say!
i'd be happier where i am if the animation industry wasnt a complete disaster rn what with mergers, lay-offs, generative AI, and general disrespect from the average "consumer" but we ball!!!!