What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
New career? New side-hustle? New creative passion? What's next for you? An open thread...
Readers,
When I was 7, a neighborhood boy told me I could only be one thing when I grew up.
We were playing make-believe, pretending my living room was a bank. (A day or two before, on a trip with my mom to the Long Beach, NY branch of Chemical Bank, I’d pilfered a stack of deposit and withdrawal slips.) First I was the teller and the boy was the customer, then we switched. A few pretend-transactions in, he inquired about my future career plans.
“I’m going to be an actress and a singer and a dancer,” I said, “and also a writer, and a teacher, and a nurse, and a stewardess, and a bank teller.”
“No, you can’t do all that,” he informed me. “You only get to be one thing.”
This made more of an impression on me than it probably should have. At 7 I didn’t yet know not to take career advice from someone as young as I was. Nonetheless, 50 years later I bear three titles, partly out of necessity: writer, editor, and teacher. And I’d like to believe that here at the tall end of “midlife,” maybe it isn’t too late for me to venture into other pursuits, professionally and creatively.
On the one hand, it makes sense to me that at my age, I’d need to narrow down my bucket list. On the other hand, now and then I find myself daydreaming about trying screenwriting, podcasting, acting, singing—for fun, but who knows? Maybe it could lead to more.
What about you? Do you have new creative or professional ambitions you’d like to pursue? Or old ambitions you’re not ready to discard?
I think often about that George Eliot quote: “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” I want to believe there’s truth to it—and not just for those with great privilege and intergenerational wealth, but for all of us, at least to some degree.
Many Oldster contributors have written about later-in-life pivots. What dreams would you pursue now if there were no obstacles? Tell me in the comments…
- Sari
I went to law school at 40, practiced law for 20+ years, then earned an MS in counseling at 70. I'm almost 72 and loving my second year of full-time mental health counseling. I'm fortunate to have good health and that matters a lot. Mostly, I followed a sense that I was needed somewhere, by someone.
At 65, I have so many thoughts on this. I never fulfilled any of my dreams, and am thinking a lot about how I can do more of that now. It's possible and also it's different. I really, really loathe when people say "it's never too late," because for some things it is - and I think the people who say that usually already have the thing I'm wanting and it was easy for them, or they read some story about a 90-year-old skydiver not understanding that it's an interesting story precisely because it's an outlier.
At 57 I was hired in a millennial tech start-up, where I worked until the pandemic shut the company down. In many ways I loved it, I was challenged by it, I was proud of the work I did, and I found some real friends there. It was also incredibly hard and stressful and there was a lot of micro-aggressive ageism.
This past year, I undertook a certificate program in a type of museum work where I thought I might be able to fulfill a long-held deep love of museums and use some skills (retirement is not an option, I need to work for real money). I'm now supposed to do an internship. I can do it, but I wonder how I'll be received, and if there will be any beneficial outcome for me. I've loved the learning, and in fact would love to go back for a Masters, but again, there are financial and time tradeoffs and there is ALWAYS a layer of knowing I don't fit in and am atypical.
I'm also an artist who's never committed to being a professional artist and selling work. Although my situation feels precarious that's something I'd like to do.
So I guess I want to say that yes, it's possible, it's exciting, it's scary, it's wildly uncomfortable to try to do the thing when you're old. There are costs and there are limitations, as there always are. I firmly believe in lifelong learning and lifelong creativity. And yet, most of the breathless "it's never too late" clichés don't really ever tell the whole story. It can also feel lonely, and you have to be able to tolerate (at best) people "youngsplaining" to you how to do simple things and how the world works, and at worst, real resistance to you being in a space where old people typically aren't.