What do you want to do or be when you grow up?

I've never had an ambition, or a goal/s in life, at 63 I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know if it's because I was never encouraged to do anything when I was a child, although I was often discouraged. If like most little girls I said I wantd to be a nurse, I was told that I wouldn't really want to that as it would involve carrying used bed pans around. A wish to be a hairdresser was met with disgust.

We had no careers advice at school, or at least not until we'd made our exam choices and it was to late to change anything. Some of the teachers said there was no point in educating us as we'd only go off and get married and have babies.

After leaving school, I was asked what I wanted to do and could never answer, I simply didn't know, I remember being told to search through a filing cabinet of folders about possible careers and found nothing, I was just overwhelmed. I think it also didn't help that a "career" was a fairly new thing, for people of my class, we's always had "jobs", which was a very different thing.

How did you find the thing you wanted to do, or do you still not know?

Do you do the job you trained for? 

Parents
  • There isn’t anything I want to particularly do, I’ve never had any real ambitions either to be honest. Some people smile and joke when they talk about something that happened at work so there must be some sort of positive connection and it’s not all doom and gloom either that or they are presenting a more upbeat version of events. I once considered psychiatric nursing but the reality of that job was far from the dream I had imagined saving the helpless and being a listening ear, if anyone didn’t come out of that job without mental scars themselves I would ironically question their sanity. A strong indication that I couldn’t do care work or anything too mentally taxing like that is that I feel I barely able hold my own reality in place let alone helping others fix theirs. Is it the case that most people have more positive motivators in their lives? A better education and therefore more of an idea of what they love in life to follow on a career with? 

Reply
  • There isn’t anything I want to particularly do, I’ve never had any real ambitions either to be honest. Some people smile and joke when they talk about something that happened at work so there must be some sort of positive connection and it’s not all doom and gloom either that or they are presenting a more upbeat version of events. I once considered psychiatric nursing but the reality of that job was far from the dream I had imagined saving the helpless and being a listening ear, if anyone didn’t come out of that job without mental scars themselves I would ironically question their sanity. A strong indication that I couldn’t do care work or anything too mentally taxing like that is that I feel I barely able hold my own reality in place let alone helping others fix theirs. Is it the case that most people have more positive motivators in their lives? A better education and therefore more of an idea of what they love in life to follow on a career with? 

Children
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