Honestly,
When we ask children what they want to be when they grow up, we usually expect a job title.
Educator.
Veterinarian.
Firefighter.
Singer.
Or, in my son’s case, a dinosaur. During his kindergarten slideshow, my son announced—to the entire gymnasium, via PowerPoint—that he wanted to grow up and be a dinosaur.
The day he realized that wish wasn’t going to come true is a whole different letter.
Maybe the dinosaur dream is about freedom from conventional career planning. Not every childhood answer requires a deeper interpretation.
Still, I have been thinking about that question.
Children answer it as though the whole world is still available to them. They do not begin with salary ranges, health insurance, commute times, or whether the role will require proficiency in a software program that did not exist when they learned to read.
They tell you what sounds interesting.
What feels brave.
What lets them help, explore, build, perform, protect, or be heard.
Then life does what life does.
We become practical. We follow opportunities, or discover that some opportunities are not available to us. We care for people. We pay bills that arrive with impressive consistency. We change plans. Sometimes we are building a life. Sometimes we are simply surviving one.
We get very good at being useful.
Eventually, the person we once imagined becoming can start to feel like someone we made up.
But maybe that childhood answer was never a prediction.
Maybe it was a clue.
The child who wanted to be a veterinarian may have wanted to care for something vulnerable. The child drawn to education may have loved the moment when someone finally understood. The singer may have wanted to be heard. The astronaut may have wanted to go somewhere no one they knew had been.
The job title might change completely while the longing underneath it stays remarkably loyal.
I have spent a lot of my life doing very grown-up things. Work that mattered. Decisions that mattered. Family that mattered. The ordinary, relentless work of being someone other people could count on.
And then there was this part of me that kept wanting to write.
For me, putting my name on Colleen Honestly has felt less like becoming someone new and more like finally answering a knock I had heard for years.
It turns out that writing counts before anyone gives you permission to call yourself a writer.
That should have been obvious, but adulthood is full of information we apparently need to relearn in our own handwriting.
I do not think we need to put our entire lives on trial because of something we said when we were eight. That would be an unnecessarily harsh performance review for someone who may still have needed help tying her shoes.
Eight-year-olds have many gifts. Long-range risk assessment is not always one of them.
But I do wonder what mattered to that younger version of us.
Not whether she would be impressed by the title on our business card.
Whether she would recognize us.
Would she see the way we care for people?
Would she notice that we kept going through things she could not yet imagine?
Would she recognize our humor, our curiosity, the part of us that still gets excited when we learn something new?
And what might she ask?
When did you stop drawing?
Why do you apologize before sharing an idea?
When did being responsible begin to mean there was no room left for anything you loved?
No dramatic reinvention is required. We do not have to set fire to the life we built just to prove we remember the child who imagined it.
Sometimes a quiet return is enough.
Twenty minutes with a paintbrush. A library card. A class. A page. A different road home because you have always wondered where it goes.
Maybe growing up is not only about becoming someone new.
Maybe it is also about finding our way back to the parts of ourselves that were there before the world told us to be practical.
I do not know what you wanted to be when you grew up.
I wonder what that answer was trying to tell you.
It may still be waiting for another turn.
