I’m sure everyone has heard the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It was as if every teacher or older person convened in a nationwide meeting with a half-sheet of talking points for kids.
Answers varied from police officer to fireman to me, wanting to be an astronaut. Then I learned how long astronauts are in space and what they sacrifice for the next space-level discovery, and thought, “I’m good. Enough people are floating up there.” Shout-out to Mae Jemison for putting the thought in my head. I still love astronomy, yet some things are best loved from a distance. And, one of the things best loved from a distance is the need to know-it-all about life and the pursuit of life.
When I graduated high school, I realized how little I knew. I welcomed not knowing and knew that I would learn and find it out. Not because I’m some genius or a freak science experiment that morphed me into one of three PowderPuff Girls. Simply because I knew that I had been equipped with enough tools in school thus far to navigate what I would enjoy. For me, that turned out to be storytelling. It wasn’t attached to journalism (which I majored in) or getting an English degree. It was sparked by watching Nike commercials and learning about the story behind some of my favorite athletes growing up. It was reading Freddie Campion on Vogue.com interviews on bands that because of websites that will not be named, I had the chance to learn about before their claim to fame. It was being more drawn to the Arts and Entertainment section of newspapers, and enjoying reading interviews in magazines of a celeb I liked. It was a book that sparked inspiration for me and made me feel as though I had a story worth putting on paper.
I could not tell people what I wanted to be when I grew up because I simply did not know. I had not lived the life I needed to so that I could discover what made sense for me and my purpose on this Earth. I did not know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I discovered it. Despite that most close to me thought that I would go to art school or graduate college with an art degree. Both fair. I drew before I ever started writing, but those pictures told stories as well. And as I would learn, I would incorporate what I learned into my drawings. Just as I do with writing.
When I grew up, I knew that I was meant to be a storyteller and that is not attached to a specific job title or label. It is fluid and changing while merging disciplines all at once. It is a necessary vein in the making sense of and the functioning of our world. It is where hope and imagination often spring from. It is limitless.
Despite my photo from Headquarters, I don’t believe growing up is a trap. I believe growing up is a dreaming, a wandering. I believe growing up is to live in constant discovery of yourself and the world around you. Is it difficult? Absolutely. Throw being a Black woman who is an introvert who has a distinct South Central Los Angeles accent in there and I could tell stories for days about the assumptions made about me. And, how often those assumptions help me weed people out in terms of who gets proximity to me.
But the gift of my parents giving me and my siblings the ability and space to dream beyond other’s expectations and imagine a life that makes sense for us, well that makes growing up less of a trap.
And to quote a TikTok trend, most days, “I think I like this little life.”