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!