What I Wanted To Be When I Grew Up

Me at work a few years ago: ESL teacher on an excursion*

It's that time again... Listicles! This week's topic is pretty awesome: ten things you thought you'd do or be back when you were a child. My ideas about what I'd be & do when I grew up changed every year. I can't really come up with ten jobs that I wanted as a kid, so I'll have to include other things too. Here's a list:

1. Artist: I started drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon & my love for making visual art eventually led me to a couple of years at Emily Carr after high school. I don't really make much art anymore, though as a stilt performer, I suppose you'd call me an artist.
2. Nurse: my mom had these books with envelopes for each school year where we'd write our height, weight & career aspirations next to our school photo. I think I wrote this one year.
3. A lawyer: I think I put this down into the book one year... or thought about it for a few months. I like arguing... but I wasn't interested in the actual job when I realized what the working environment & hours would be like.
4. Writer: this was one that sort of alternated with artist from year to year. & I'm proud to say, as of 2011, I've actually gotten paid to do it, if not made an actual living at it. Though not as a novelist, which is what I was envisioning in those ancient times before blogs & laptops.
5. Well-travelled: I've done a couple of month-long international trips to Europe. I've been to Germany, France, Belgium, The Netherlands & England. Also the US, on other trips, mostly with family. I'd still like to do a lot more travelling, but MAN is it expensive & Europe is REALLY far away from the west coast of Canada.
6. A fashion designer: I started really basic hand sewing when I was in kindergarten & was using my mom's Singer by age 9. Combined with my love of drawing, this was a natural fit. I still sew & I love to see a designer's couture line on the runway, but as a career? Nah.
7. A librarian: I think I wanted to be this at one point when I was small. I love reading & always have--a big thanks to my parents who are both bookworms & passed it on to us too.
8. A book illustrator. A bit more specific than artist. I'd still like to do this some day...
9. Married: When I was little, I always assumed I'd meet someone, fall in love & then get married. Though there was a brief few years where I decided marriage was backward & didn't fit with my politics, I eventually caved to societal pressure in 2003. Also, I wanted to have a big party.
10. A mother: This was step two after the fall-in-love-&-get-married bit. Also decided I wasn't ever going to have kids when I was 21ish. I pretended I didn't want to have kids for years after that so my mom wouldn't hassle me for grandchildren as much. Didn't work. She started knitting for the grandchildren YEARS before she ever actually had any.

I'm pretty sure if I looked back at that book, I wouldn't find teacher written in there. I thought it was the last thing I'd do, particularly in high school. I didn't become a high school teacher, but in my eight years as an ESL teacher I did teach my fair share of teenagers, as well as adults. Spending most of my childhood in small towns in BC, I wasn't exposed to a lot of crazy circus performers, so I didn't really envision becoming a stilt walker until I was an adult & I started to see them at festivals here in East Van. I also never could have anticipated the way the internet would become such a huge part of my life: blogger or social media manager just didn't exist in the 1980s.

What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you do it or were the results completely different from what you expected as a child?

*APOLOGIES for the quality of this photo. It was taken on my first camera phone: a 0.3 megapixel Nokia something-or-other.

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