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
  • I‘ve always had a plan. Even in kindergarten I always knew how I wanted my life to look like. Those dreams changed over the years, but I‘m always working towards a goal, the uncertainty and meaninglessness of not working towards something would probably stop from doing anything at all. I‘m now hoping to become a doctor and be able to do research at least partly (there are some options that allow doctors to step out of practicing medicine to go into research for a certain time).

    I don‘t know if my urge to always focus on a particular goal is the healthiest thing for me, but I don’t know how to cope otherwise.

Reply
  • I‘ve always had a plan. Even in kindergarten I always knew how I wanted my life to look like. Those dreams changed over the years, but I‘m always working towards a goal, the uncertainty and meaninglessness of not working towards something would probably stop from doing anything at all. I‘m now hoping to become a doctor and be able to do research at least partly (there are some options that allow doctors to step out of practicing medicine to go into research for a certain time).

    I don‘t know if my urge to always focus on a particular goal is the healthiest thing for me, but I don’t know how to cope otherwise.

Children
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