“Who do you want to be when you grow up?”
Lydia asked me in the hallway. We were seventeen, walking out of history class, and our teacher had just spent the whole lecture on psychology. Somewhere in that hour, I fell in love with it.
I didn’t have to think. “A counselor,” I told her, out loud.
That was the last time the question felt easy.
The Answer That Emptied Me Out
At 21 I crossed an ocean to study psychology, carrying fifty dollars and a paper dictionary. Six years later, I was doing a counseling internship in Chicago. Most nights I walked through my door at seven or eight and collapsed on my bed. Then I cried. Dinner didn’t happen, because my body had nothing left for it.
I’m a huge empath. Every story I listened to during the day followed me home.
Knowing exactly who I wanted to be hadn’t protected me. I had the answer, and it was emptying me out. So I let it go.
Trying Things On
What came next was fifteen years at General Motors. I started in marketing, and every two and a half or three years I switched: purchasing, IT, HR, then a global systems project that spanned 37 countries and six languages. Nobody pushed me out of any of those roles. I love learning something new, and I wanted to see what else was out there. The global project was the one that finally burned me out.
IT surprised me most. In a room of ten guys, I was the only woman, and I kept up. Learning fast was how I earned my seat, and that room still makes me proud.
In 2019 I left GM to start my own coaching and consulting business. I was also volunteering a lot at my son’s Montessori school, and one day, on the drive there, James asked me, “Mom, how come you don’t work here?”
“Wow,” I said. “I never thought about it.”
I felt like I knew nothing about education, and even less about Montessori. Still, I started thinking about it, then having conversations. Two months later, I was running a Montessori schools.
One summer James wanted a bike, and I found a Trek on Facebook Marketplace. The man selling it told me about a program his company was running. It sounded interesting, so I applied. Two months later, I was back in corporate.
Both times, the next version of me started with my son, and both times it showed up two months later.
The One-Word Problem
Every time someone asks what I do, I wish I could hand them one word, like counselor or lawyer or accountant. Instead I give them a sentence. Until recently it went like this: I’m an innovation strategist by day and a leadership coach, mentor, writer and content creator by night. By the end of it, I could watch their eyes glaze over.
My mother never got a word from me either. When I worked in IT, she understood my job as “computers.” I tried to explain more and eventually gave up. She could have told people her daughter was a counselor.
A long introduction is what a curious life sounds like out loud.
The Hum
Underneath all of it is a hum. It sits in the back of my mind and asks the same thing every time: did I disappoint the seventeen-year-old in that hallway?
In Polish we have a phrase for where that hum comes from: co powiedzą ludzie, what will people say. I thought I left it at the airport at 21. It keeps finding its way back, translated into English and pointed at my career.
Psychologists Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson asked about 19,000 people, ages 18 to 68, how much they had changed in the past ten years and how much they expected to change in the next ten. At every age, people saw plenty of change behind them and very little ahead. The researchers called it the end of history illusion.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” falls for the same illusion. It assumes a finish line that nobody, at 18 or at 68, actually crosses.
Who Am I Becoming?
The girl in the hallway had her one word, and it still sent her home crying in Chicago. One word was never going to hold me. These days I ask a different question: who am I becoming?
This fall, that question walked me into a role of innovating career coaching. It started as a placement, and in October it became permanent. Somehow the girl in the hallway ended up close to where she started, in a version she couldn’t have pictured at seventeen. In 2027, I’m taking this exact question to a TED stage.
Back then, I found out counseling didn’t fit by living it until it broke me down every night. I learned the same way on that global project at GM. Now I find out sooner. I write who I’m becoming first, early in the morning before the house wakes up. Then I say it out loud and try it on, and I notice how it feels. When it fits, I keep it. If it doesn’t, I take it off and reach for something else.
Try it once tonight. By hand and in present tense, write three answers to “Who am I becoming?” Circle the one you’d be embarrassed to say out loud, then say it anyway, and notice what your voice does.
At seventeen I said it without stopping to think. Now I say it and wait.
I’m fifty, and I’m still trying things on.
P.S. Post your long introduction in the comments, the whole sentence, nothing trimmed. Let’s see how many curious lives are in this room.
P.P.S. If tonight’s exercise stirred something, Writing Lab 101 is where we keep going. In November we write the whole piece, and in December we publish it. The live session is recorded, $57, or included for paid members.
Same. I’m 72.
"Ever since I was young, I wanted to be both a writer and a doctor. Now, I am pursuing my post-graduation in psychiatry and have started writing on Substack. We will definitely grow!"