How do you find a new dream when your old dream was the entirety of your existence?
From the moment we enter elementary school, we are encouraged to find our dream career. It’s consistent question kids get asked, what do you want to be when you grow up? Kids are quickly pressured to look at something they are even remotely passionate about or interested in as a long term job. We are raised with the mindset that we have to find out what we are going to do for the rest of our lives even if we have only on this moving rock in space for six years, ten years, sixteen years. I recently found my old elementary yearbook and under each of our pictures was what we dreamed to be when we grow up. I had two ideas. A horse trainer or an art teacher. I had started horseback riding lessons around that time, maybe a couple years before and it quickly became the center of my entire universe. The art teacher was probably because I wanted to be just like my older sister, who was and still is a talented artist and not because I was a budding Picasso. I can hardly draw cute stick figures. The other day my coworker was talking about her ten-year old’s career day he had in school. The students of the elementary school had to make a presentation about their dream job. They had to research everything about it even the average yearly salary. My coworker said the jobs ranged from astronaut to target retail employee. Yes, you read that right, a target employee. That kind of helps me drive my point though. How can kids be mature enough at such a young age to set their goals towards a career? I do see the opposite end of the spectrum, that we are teaching kids to dream big and to send them on the path to success, and I support that but in a way could we also be setting them up for failure?
This question, what you want to be when you grow up never goes away. Then comes high school. High school is when we reach peak pressure to set our careers in place. High school is when we need to pick our college major, sealing our fates. At this point in our lives, we have been shaped by this idea of making our passions into careers. We have college looming over our heads. The question of what are you majoring in becomes the new what do you want to be when you grow up. We have been following our dreams up until this moment, envisioning our futures, plotting our ten-year plan. For me, I have been riding horses since the age of seven. It was the only thing I knew I was pretty decent at. I had no other interests or skills. Just thinking about college was daunting for me. I have always struggled in school, struggled with getting my work done, struggled with understanding the lessons. On top of that, I had no clue what I wanted to even major in. I knew that certain majors involving animals I was nowhere near smart enough for. I had no idea how I could turn my love for horses into in a career but it was a dream of mine, a passion I wanted to see turn into a career. By senior year of high school, the pressure was full on to start sending out applications for college. I went to go see my guidance counselor for you know, guidance, and at this point, I had a college in mind. She was no help, telling me I should go to the college she went to and become a guidance counselor just like her, shooting down the only dream I had. That didn’t stop me though. Before I knew it I was packing up my bags and heading five hours from home to major in equine science in a small town college, so small there was only one traffic light in the whole town. It was the only school I have applied to. I went in completely blind, hoping that I would have this magical lightbulb moment and everything would fall into place and I would come out with a career goal. Little did I know, the opposite would happen. I left with my associate’s degree and even more lost than ever before.
I spent four years trying to make my confusing dream work, each job I took moving further and further away from my major. I had so many what-ifs, what if I had taken a gap year, what if I applied to other schools, what if I did this instead of that. Eventually, I realized that thinking like that is useless. What’s done is done. We spend our entire lives developing our career goals, shaped by the question of what we want to be when we grow up swirling in the back of our minds. You build this amazing future in your mind to answer that very question. Well, what happens when that dream comes shattering down and you find yourself in your mid-twenties and you need to find a new dream. How can you even fathom that idea, that everything you worked for, fought for even was never going to come to pass? Well, that is exactly where I am at right now and I will tell you what you need to do. You need to pick up the pieces, say your goodbyes, and move on. Accept it, grief it if you have to, and go looking for a new dream. Believe me, it is way easier said than done but you get to a point in your life that you just have to face the music.
So here I am, four years after graduating from college, starting to make a path towards a new dream. I am letting go of my old dream and have found a new answer to what I want to be when I grow up. I am hopeful and excited for the future again and that is worth all of the tears I’ve cried. On this journey, I have learned that you don’t need to be forced into this box, that you need to have this one dream, one answer, one career goal. It is okay that your dream changes as you get older, even if it changes a million times. It is okay that you change majors one, two, or even three times. It is okay that your elementary school answer to what do you want to be when you grow up doesn’t match where you end up today. It is all okay. All that matters you that you never stop trying. Just keep learning, keep dreaming, and keep searching.
Skye's Ambitions 