forget star signs, what naive young vision of your future life did you abandon to become who you are today
there's a great long list. we wanted to be a whole string of things in childhood. at one point we wanted to be a composer, because we'd read books about composers. we wanted to be a plumber for a time because we liked the shapes of pipe fittings.
i wanted to write and illustrate children’s books :)
i’m gonna be honest, it’s still not entirely off the table
when i was a kid, i was strongly obsessed with computers. to be fair, it was the 90s; computers were really cool back then! but it was definitely a big autistic hyperfixation, maybe even my first one. like before pokemon, even! wow!
anyway, adults at the time were all the time telling me "when you grow up, you can be an IT guy! a computer tech! a programmer or something!" and i would nod enthusiastically and say "yeah! that sounds great!" and, eventually, i did end up walking that path. well, not quite programming, not smart enough for anything more than html+css, but certainly computer repair, IT technician type stuff. a+ cert, windows client/server, a bit of CCENT training. and over the course of that training, i discovered something about myself. something rather foundational, in point of fact. something that i wish i had discovered sooner.
i fucking hate computers.
also i'm transgender but you know thats not quite as relevant to the narrative
i wound up gainfully employed in the field, but i did abandon a naive young vision of my future: the vision that computers were a source of fun and joy and using them all day would be my ideal. 🙃
I narrowly avoided the above by realizing in my late teens that computers where a hobby for me and not a career. But at that time I also wanted to be a wildlife photographer and I even made it pretty far down that route, although for a lot of reasons it fell through (no interest in being a biologist really didn't help here)
The biggest gut wrenching naive vision I had and held onto for far too long was that "I could make everyone happy" and that vision nearly killed me enough times that I've painfully let it go to focus on who I am and what I can do
My earliest dreams for the future where to become a fairy, unicorn or other magical creature. I had abandoned that part of me for a very long time, but I've honestly reclaimed it a fair bit in recent years, because kid me was onto something
One of my biggest problems is that I didn't have a specific idea for my future growing up. Frankly the whole idea of a career seemed hideously depressing to me. Admittedly that's because of my limited understanding at the time, skewed as it was through the lens of my workaholic father's career, among other things.
That said, in highschool I did have some notion of being a writer. Hell, if anything I really wanted to dive into the arts in general. Writing, music, drawing, even animation, etc. But specifically furry-oriented. I was (and by and large still am) so in love with the whole furry subculture and furry art overall. I saw what others made and put out there, and wanted to be a part of it. I had so many stories in mind that I wanted to tell to the world in as many ways as I could.
But of course I didn't. I was always browbeat passive-aggressively that any kind of non-STEM field was a surefire way to a life of miserable poverty. So after some fumbling around in college early on, I settled on programming. And after a bad hard drive failure ate a bunch of my WIP stories, I gave up on writing for a long time. Pair that with depression and my other mental health issues, along with a gaming addiction that ate up so much of my time, and I've basically gone nowhere and just been spinning my wheels in the mud, so to speak, for years and years.
Last year I went on a gaming hiatus picked up writing again after a bit of a breakdown. And I've really thrown myself into it. And you know what? While my mental health is still absolutely horrendous at times, for the first time since I can't remember when, I feel like I have some kind of purpose in life. A reason to wake up, to keep living. If for no other reason than I have stories I have to finish and get out there. Especially my big passion project of the last year, Mystic Heart Odyssey. If I do nothing else with my life, I want to see that series to the end.
Passion is important, people. A job, hell a career, is just what you do to make ends meet. Don't let it define what you care about or pursue. One of the biggest mistakes of my life was letting that passion go dormant for so long.
