"What do you want to be when you grow up?"

...I have no idea.

I'm 36--ostensibly "grown up" by anybody's reckoning--and I still have no idea.

When I was a kid, it was a pretty common question. I'd usually say I wanted to be a policeman: that's what Dad was, after all. Heck, my Mom was an auxiliary policewoman for a few years, my Uncle Ted was a career cop, my cousin is a cop: I could go on. Surrounded by peace officers for much of my life, I regarded them (and still do, actually) as prosaic superheroes. Maybe they didn't have extraordinary powers (although you try stopping three lanes of traffic with a single wave of your hand!), but they are the embodiment of the Superhero's Creed, expressed in different ways depending on which Force we're taking about: Maintain the Right; To Serve and Protect; Friendly, Swift and Correct; Answer the Call. Don't all of those sound like something out of Marvel Comics, something noble and inspiring? They do to me.
Alas, I knew pretty early that "police officer" wouldn't be in my professional future. I just couldn't picture myself meeting the physical requirements of the job, for one thing, but beyond that, a crook could saunter by me with his loot in plain view and I wouldn't notice a goddamned thing. It's not that my vision's bad (although it is...without glasses on I'm all but blind in one eye and not that much better in the other): it's that I seem to be incapable of the level of attention most of the rest of humanity takes for granted. I can pay fierce attention to any one thing, ignoring everything else. Or I can pay a cursory attention to a bunch of things--and like as not something will slip by unnoticed. Can you imagine that quality in a cop?
I think even when I was five and six years old, I knew I'd never be a police officer. But I didn't know how else to answer the question, and that question was everywhere. Whenever adults meet little kids, "what do you want to be when you grow up" is one of the first five questions they hit 'em with. In the primary grades at school, it's a topic for presentation to the class. And so on.
Luckily, I could bullshit my way through whenever the topic came up. It helped when I discovered that "I don't know" was a perfectly valid response.
I hated--hated--to admit I didn't know something. My attitude used to be, if you asked me a question, you expected an answer...if I couldn't give you an answer, well, that'd mean I was a failure. Who wants a failure in their lives?
Sounds melodramatic, I know. I was nothing if not melodramatic as a teen. I remember going into my final year of high school...I found out on the first day that my world history course would start around the eleventh century and work its way forward. I panicked. I knew nothing about the eleventh century...nothing. It terrified me. I needed to have at least some grounding in eleventh century politics, music...anything. Best if I could supply a few tidbits even the teacher didn't know about, of course--not to look like a show-off, that wasn't it, just so that I'd be a little more comfortable, so the ground wouldn't be completely alien. I'd settle for the slightest bit of background to seize on....anything!
The Internet in 1990 wasn't what it is now. Even if it was, I didn't have access. I was screwed. I went to my parents and told them how scared I was.
"But", said my mom, "isn't that the whole reason you go to school? To learn things?"
"No", I said, looking at her as if she was nuts. "The purpose of school is to show people what you've learned."

That looks ridiculous, doesn't it? But I believed it. In fact, it was obvious to me: why else did they give you tests and exams? Why else did you have to write essays? To show what you'd learned. And it's not as if you could learn much in a classroom setting. My God, they'd make you read aloud to the class, seemingly just to slow you down. Sometimes they'd even discount stuff you'd learned, if it didn't come from the text. Didn't matter if it was true, hell, no.

In my OAC year of high school I had to make a decision. I had to choose a path, leading to what I wanted to be when I grew up.

I'm not indecisive. Am I?

Well, I knew math was out, because I sucked at math. Science, likewise. I was pretty good at the abstract stuff in science--I knew lots of psychology, sociology, and the like--but when it got down to formulas, that was math, and I sucked at math. As to what I could do...
I could play piano pretty well. I'd been composing stuff since I was four, and I could play by ear. But, being largely self-taught, and having given up on the shackles of formal lessons, I couldn't play piano properly. In the educational system, properly counts for a lot more than well.
I could write. True, I couldn't keep my mind on a single topic long enough to turn out anything beyond a ten or fifteen page paper (still can't)...but it seemed reasonable at the time to pick something I had to do a lot of writing in.
I could read. I loved to read. Writing...reading...hello, degree in English Language and Literature.

That soured on me, too...no more than a year in, it started to go bad. I ran across the "if it didn't come from me, it's not true" attitude in a wide variety of professors, which irritated me. Worse, the pace--in undergraduate courses--was even slower than it had been in high school. Profs would read the text to you verbatim...what the hell was the point of that, especially since you had to buy the text?
Other things were contributing to my malaise, an Internet addiction chief among them, but by the time I dropped out in disgrace, I hated university at least as much as it hated me.

And I still didn't know what I wanted to be "when I grew up".

Since then, I've worked in retail. It was never supposed to be a career, more of a stopgap until I figured out the answer to that vexing question.

I'm 36, and I still don't know. What I do know is this: the verb's wrong. Nobody ever asks you "what do you want to do when you grow up", even though that's what they're really asking. There's this pressure to define yourself by the thing you do to get money into the house. Unless you're a superhero police officer or firefighter or, say, teacher, what you do for money ought to be the least important thing about you. I wish I could go back in time and answer every last person who ever asked me that question. I'd do it in one word.

"Kenny, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"Loved."