Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What I Wanted to Do When I Grew Up vs. What I Do

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Woman leaping between boulders. The one she is leaping to has the word "job" on it. What I wanted to do:

It changed every year, and sometimes I had no idea what I wanted at all.

Generally, my dreams revolved around being a librarian, college professor, or bestselling author.

I love books, knowledge, and teaching things to adults. If the occupational outlooks for librarians or professors were better, I probably would have gone in one of those directions!

What I actually do: I’m currently a writer who is looking for ways to pivot back into the traditional workforce. Those plans were interrupted by Covid-19, so I’m still evaluating my options as far as job training, online courses, or additional volunteering goes to strengthen my resume as the economy (hopefully) improves. We’ll see what happens!

I’ve previously worked in all sorts of places, from retail to tutoring to office work. I enjoyed my office job the most because of how personable my bosses were there. Having wonderful bosses makes all the difference in the world.

Once I worked in a movie theatre that my coworkers swore was haunted because of weird sounds they heard and how certain objects like mop buckets tended to move around when certain people were cleaning. I preferred rational explanations for those phenomena, but I also didn’t look too closely into the shadowy regions of the employee-only zones late at night. Ha!

26 Comments

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26 Responses to Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What I Wanted to Do When I Grew Up vs. What I Do

  1. I did much of the same floating from job to job when I was younger. Also re: ghosts — I absolutely believe in them (I even wrote a post about my own ghost, here: http://www.mariannearkins.com/wednesday-woo-woo/).

    Good luck in your upcoming job search!

  2. verushka

    Personable bosses do make ALL the difference. And I also want to visit the movie theatre you worked in!

  3. Echo Ishii

    I used to want to be a librarian too. I ended up with a job where I spend a lot of time in the library so that’s pretty close,

  4. Sydney Winward

    Being a librarian would be so fun! You would get to be around books all the time.

  5. Hi there Lydia! I had dreams of becoming a playwright or a journalist. I studied journalism for a year, hated it and desperately wanted to go back to theater. It just never worked out like that… I ended up studying Psychology and did HR for many years until I met my husband. I then went to special needs teaching and that’s what I still do for an income. But I do run the library at the school where I’m based as well, so I deal with books on a daily basis!

    I promised to share my post on The art of racing in the rain with you, here it is! Wednesday Wisdom

    • Oh, that’s so cool! I have a friend who is a special needs teacher. It’s such an interesting line of work.

      Thank you for sharing your Art of Racing in the Rain post! I’m headed off to read it now.

  6. It’s pretty nice to be a jack of all trades, so to speak. It helps when you need to find something to do to pay the bills. 🙂 Good post.

  7. I thought about becoming a librarian, too, after working in the school library in 8th grade. Hoping you can find a job that suits you once things settle down a bit.

  8. Best wishes for surviving the pandemic and getting back to work. Keep writing and blogging, you’re good at it.

  9. A working environment makes all the difference in the world to job satisfaction. Enjoyed your post. Good luck with the search. Here’s mine. https://www.tenastetler.com/lsrs-wed-blog-challenge-what-i-wanted-to-do-when-i-grew-up-vs-what-i-do/

  10. As a kid, I wanted (at varying times) to be a comic author/children’s illustrator, a radio host, or a CIA operative. (…I was really into spies for a while.) I didn’t hit on library science until my 20s. I still haven’t bothered with an MLS, though, because I don’t need one. When did you first start thinking about it?

    • That’s such a cool mix of ideas.

      I first started thinking about it years ago. How did you get a job in library science without a MLS? I thought that was basically a requirement these days?

      • Perhaps in larger city systems, but in our library virtually everyone except for the accountant uses what they’ve learned on the job, with different skills on the department. Even our two catalogers were taught the trade by catalogers before them, not in school. We’ve had ONE lady with an MLS working here in my time, on a staff of 15, and she told me she considered her time & money spent on acquiring that degree to be wasted, because so much of what we do is learned first-hand, like customer service skills and using new systems. I can’t help but agree: when she retired, I assumed all of her responsibilities. Nothing we do REQUIRES knowledge we can’t learn on our own, making me think MLS requirements are just gatekeeping a lot of the time. I MIGHT consider it if I ever moved towns, but I’d be just as likely to change vocations if I were moving.

  11. Working in a haunted movie theatre sounds interesting! That must have been fun!

  12. I didn’t compose an answer to this, but I think my experience was somewhat similar to yours: I kind of grew up expecting to try a bunch of different jobs before finally settling into something.

    And, of course, the kind of IT work I do now didn’t exist when I was growing up, so that makes the question doubly difficult for me.

    I never had the chance to work in a haunted movie theater, though. That sounds like fun.

  13. I did briefly think about being a professor myself, but I hate doing original research, so I’d have been terrible at it. Great post.

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