When I Grow Up...

One day, when I was in kindergarten, we each got a worksheet about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I remember sitting in my super tiny chair, with the teacher's aide kneeling beside me holding a fat marker over the blank line on my paper, impatient to write down my answer and move on to the next kid.

"Sarah, do you want to be... a teacher?" Nope.

"A ballerina?" Naaaaah.

"A police officer?" Nuh-uh.

"Okay, well... you have to pick something to be, silly! How about a nurse!"

Oh, nurse, totalllyyyy. *Internal five year old self rolls eyes* I conceded. I was too embarrassed to admit that I totalllyyyy did NOT want to be a nurse, and I was tired of making the poor aide venture into my uncertainties with me. I took home that worksheet and always felt weird looking at it, because it was utter BS! I knew I didn't want to be a nurse. Or a ballerina. Or a teacher. But I didn't know what I wanted to be in the slightest.

Things haven't changed much. Today at the YMCA a coworker asked me what I was "studying" and I said, "Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh Economics?" OH WOW OKAY OKAY THAT'S COOL WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO WITH THAT?

Hmmm I don't know, I've thought about this, or maybe that, or maybe both...

And somehow by the end of the conversation she had convinced me to become a social worker. All the time I talk to people about my potential plans and they seem like they genuinely want to help me figure it out. You're majoring in this? You should do that after. And then you'll have those things and these things and there you go! ALL SET! You're welcome.

I mean, it's fine. I'm open to suggestions, for sure, especially considering the fact that I'm 20, a junior in college, with a couple twelve majors and two schools behind me, and I am about two inches closer to knowing what I want to do with my life than I did when I was in high school. Or kindergarten, really.

I've never had a particular dream for my future. I don't even have a mental picture of what I'll LOOK like ten years from now*, much less what I'll be DOING! And it's not that I'm not ambitious, because oh, I am. It's more that I'm farrrrrrrrrrrrr too ambitious when it comes to having the perfect career...

At breakfast I have every intention of working at a publishing company--a nice Nine-to-Five with some light reading in the evenings! Ahhh! By lunch, I've designed an innovative new floor lamp** and will probably make millions off it. By dinner, the lamp has already been rejected by QVC and I'm now a counselor for teen delinquents, and then when I'm laying in bed falling asleep I decide that's too much stress and I'll just open a doggy daycare.

So who the heck even knows...! And this brings us to the end of today's post. I bet you thought you'd get to the end of this blog and read something like But As Long As I Stay True To Myself I'll Be Happy No Matter What! *gleaming smile* But NO. No promises here.

Footnotes:
*Future Sarah, PLEASE don't get bangs and let yourself go. I hope you've finished losing those 15 pounds we gained in college and also found a foundation shade that matches our skintone. Love, Present Sarah.
**Seriously though, It's literally a floor lamp, LIKE THE FLOOR IS THE LAMP. Brilliant... I know.