As children, many of us were quizzed about the future, always framed the same way: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” 

I learned this was a question about work, and I dutifully answered with whatever seemed attractive to me at the time — ballerina, artist, veterinarian, teacher. I didn’t have any meaningful understanding of what it would mean to pursue any of these occupations, or what kind of lifestyle might support them. They were just characters from my books, their identities signaled entirely through costuming. To a child, becoming a ballerina was as uncomplicated as putting on a leotard and spinning across a stage; swapping for a white lab coat and a stethoscope gave us the authority to examine any human or animal. The adults were always charmed and encouraging. I remember them congratulating me on “my plans.” 

“To a child, becoming a ballerina was as uncomplicated as putting on a leotard and spinning across a stage.”

I am struck now by the phrasing of this question: What do you want to be? 

What an expansive, philosophical question! Posed to a child, it seems comically abstract — how do you want to identify? What do you want to project about yourself as you move through the world? Not even for right now, but for that looming, unspecified time of “adulthood.” The unknown future, the endless stretch of time we have yet to encounter. The concept of time, of the self, are concepts that we might grapple with all our lives, and here we are, posing them so casually to kids.

Maybe children are better equipped to answer such a question than many adults. After all, the phrasing begins by tapping into their desires, and children are especially in touch with what they want. 

They possess the clarity of imagination without restriction; children don’t self-police their desires by moralizing them, or hem themselves in with logistics. 

“Children don’t self-police their desires by moralizing them, or hem themselves in with logistics.”

Plus, they are in a state of rapid flux, so it feels more natural to experiment with their answers without worrying that anything they choose might become fixed in stone. They can appreciate the allure of their desire without any of the practical concerns that might make them less appealing. The question of being an astronaut isn’t weighed against the cost of prerequisites, for example; the question of switching to something else — even something fantastical, like a fairy princess, or a unicorn — comes down simply to whatever’s in the dress-up chest. They don’t worry about what they could/would/should say so much as surrender to whatever might be drawing their attention most in that moment. They follow their interests without inhibition, letting their hearts want what they want — until they’re taught to stop. 

It makes me wonder what might be possible if we never stopped. 

Coming-of-age(s)

Many of us were introduced to the Bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age novel, in high school English class. The hallmark of the genre is the protagonist’s surge of psychological, emotional, and moral development that ultimately takes them over the threshold from childhood into adulthood. Think: “Catcher in the Rye” and “Harry Potter.” It’s a monumental transition we all must go through, and it’s no wonder that it shows up again and again across books, TV, and film. 

Despite the age-specific terminology, it’s clear to me that we don’t come of age just this one time. The journey between one stage of life into another — from switching careers, to becoming a parent, to living through trauma — all create a distinct timeline of Before and After. Our perspectives, our experience, our sense of self all changes, and not always in predictable ways. 

“Despite the age-specific terminology, it’s clear to me that we don’t come of age just this one time.”

Sometimes we find ourselves deepening into our sense of self, taking root in a new landscape; sometimes we find ourselves expanding into unknown spaces, overtaken with a curiosity that turns all our goals into adventure; sometimes we find the focus and guideposts of our daily pursuits narrowing down with pinpoint precision, cutting out the things we once considered steadfast and essential. 

And sometimes we find ourselves firmly at the fork in the road, with a sudden and powerful sense that we don’t actually know where we’re trying to go anymore. Even a map can’t help us if we don’t know what destination we’re trying to reach. 

At the many crossroads I’ve faced since childhood, the specter of that old question appears in my mind. 

What do you want to be? Unlike my child self, I rarely have a clear-cut answer. 

Why is that? 

What gets in my way? Even if I pare the question back to the slightly more concrete, “What do you want?” I falter. I can barely begin to form the words in my mind before I’m already editing them, critiquing them, or finding all the ways they aren’t reasonable, practical, possible. 

I’m at such a place now. Two years into the health diagnosis that upended my family’s life, I am tentatively finding pockets of time that could be filled with pursuits I’ve since abandoned — finishing my novel, mainly. But I know it won’t be anything like it was in the Before times, and that the interruptions of health and medical needs will continue to occur without any predictability. I also know I have better tools to cope and endure these events, and that the recovery time is often much shorter. 

I am not the same person I was before my daughter’s diagnosis. How could I be? The life we have now is so fundamentally distinct from the one we used to live. Diabetes management flipped almost everything: what was once easy (snack time, play dates, playing in the rain) is now complicated; what once kept me up at night with anxiety (social development, reading progress, motor skills) now feel far less fraught. And this shift didn’t just affect me as a parent, it changed the stakes across all other facets of my life, too. 

“The thing I keep wondering is whether I still even want the same things that I used to. It’s an oddly terrifying thought.”

So the thing I keep wondering is whether I still even want the same things that I used to. It’s an oddly terrifying thought; after years spent chasing the dream of writing a book, my identity was a little wrapped up in that version of myself. What kind of writer would I be if I wasn’t doggedly pursuing commercial publishing success? If my novel never makes it out of my computer, am I just another failed novelist? And will this cover me and whatever else I try to pursue like some sort of stain — even if the only person who really sees it is me?

Whenever I find myself with a block of free time now, I low-key panic. Two years ago, I was fighting tooth and nail for every spare minute to spend working on my book; now, I sort of piddle around, undecided, running down the clock. 

It feels like I’m waiting, only I don’t yet know what I’m waiting for.

On being “ready”

I recently saw this video on Instagram where creator Christi Newrutzen answers the question How to act before you feel ready? — and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Because it occurred to me after listening to her, that maybe what’s been stopping me from getting back into my book is just this: I’m waiting to feel ready.

I encourage you to watch it yourself to get the full blast of her brand of quirky, gentle wisdom, but I’ll summarize it for you here: 

1. Ask yourself “what does that even mean?”

For many of us, the span of time between identifying our goal and then implementing our action steps can include a period of “getting ready.” But “readiness” is more of a catchall for dozens of distinct and sometimes disparate states of being. 

“‘Readiness’ is more of a catchall for dozens of distinct and sometimes disparate states of being. “

Maybe you want to feel informed or prepared — maybe feeling ready comes down to a sense of confidence. Maybe you feel frightened, and you know you’re ready once that feeling passes. Maybe you’ll only feel ready if you have a guaranteed outcome in hand — some certainty that you’ll 100% achieve your goal.

Of course, waiting on any of these things might have us waiting forever. This is because standing on the precipice of something new is, by its very nature, going to make us feel acutely aware of just how uncomfortable it is. It’s so risky! There are so many ways it could go wrong! The longer we stand there, thinking hard about that first big step we need to take, the easier it is to feel like we really need to spend a little more time “getting ready.”

But there’s the rub: If starting something new is anything like standing at a cliff’s edge, the only way we could possibly ever feel “ready” to do something as terrifying as jumping off it would be by, well, having done it.

“Confidence comes after action,” Newrutzen says. “Not the other way around.” 

2. Experiment.

“At the core, you care too deeply about accomplishing this thing perfectly,” Newrutzen wrote in the caption. “You are over-attached to the idea that if you plan enough, wait long enough, or control enough variables you can guarantee a good outcome. That is an illusion.”

The trouble with adults is that we are generally uncomfortable being anything less than great at whatever we’re doing. It doesn’t matter if we’re trying something for the first time, or if the thing we’re doing is objectively challenging — we will still feel some kind of way if our early attempts are not instantly great. 

“The trouble with adults is that we are generally uncomfortable being anything less than great at whatever we’re doing.”

I was an adult educator for many years, and I can’t tell you how many times I’d have to adjust my class goals from whatever my original plan was to simply getting my adult students to try. And it didn’t matter if I was teaching an English language class to refugees or a charcoal portrait class to retirees, because the bottom line was the same: They weren’t going to learn a thing if they didn’t act. 

The solution was ultimately always the same: I had to convince them I’d lowered the stakes. 

For me, this often looked like going full on rodeo clown — also known as making an utter fool of myself. With my language learners, I’d invite them to teach me something in their own language first. If it was anything besides Spanish (and it often was), I didn’t even have to try to be comically tragic at it — I just had to be sure I was loud. In the art classes, I would make a huge “mistake” on my example, right off the bat. “Oops! I have this huge black mark right in the middle!” or “Whoops! I ripped my paper in half!” Instead of throwing it away and starting again, I’d just work with the “bad” one. What I wanted to disrupt was this feeling like we were in a traditional school setting, where they were expecting some grade at the end of the day to qualify their efforts as good or not. And that made it hard to start. 

An experiment feels more accessible. The experience is meant to give you more information, to facilitate your discovery. It’s much easier to say a foreign word out loud or put a brush to canvas if the whole point isn’t to prove whether you’re good at it or not, but just to see what it feels like.

3. Address the problems as you go.

Here, Newrutzen brings the truly genius reminder that you can’t really fix problems you haven’t yet encountered. “Can you solve a 300 piece puzzle by just staring at it?” she asks. “I’m sure you know where I’m going with this but in case you have never done a puzzle before, the way to solve it by actually picking up the pieces and putting it together as you go.”

“In case you have never done a puzzle before, the way to solve it by actually picking up the pieces and putting it together as you go.”

– Christi Newrutzen

This is another way of saying that you don’t know what you don’t know. So how in the world could you possibly prepare for it?

What if we simply accepted that we will have some problems to face at some point — problems that we won’t be able to anticipate necessarily, and problems that we might only be able to solve by dealing with them face-to-face? Honestly, I thought that might sound scarier, but really it seems like kind of a relief. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a puzzle-lover, but it seems much less overwhelming to know that once I face the problem, I’ll already be in the thick of doing the thing. That’s a much more accessible way to solve it, rather than from the outside looking in, well before I’ve even let myself get started. 

So sure, there will be problems down the line — but those are not my problems yet. They won’t become my problems until I’m actively doing it — learning the language, making the art, writing the book — when I’ll be ready for them. 

Or at least, more ready than I could ever be from here, well before I actually start. 

Just doing it — quickly, messy, badly

The best gift a life of artmaking and art education has ever given me is this simple, fundamental truth: Nothing exists until it exists. Your ideas, your goals, your dreams, your desires — these are energies, not facts. 

“Nothing exists until it exists. Your ideas, your goals, your dreams, your desires — these are energies, not facts.”

Every time I get a big new idea for a story, I have the urge to gush about it to my spouse. Aaron is also a writer, and so he rarely responds with the sort of instant awe and wonder at the concept alone. “Let’s see it on the page,” he often says. 

As his wife — a human woman who is sometimes looking for the simple wonder and praise for her raw genius (lol) — this can be sort of annoying. But as a writer, it’s a crucial reminder that the idea is just that — the idea. How it turns out, what happens after it goes from the conceptual phase into a state of being is a different question entirely. 

If I want it to exist — if I want this idea to become real — I have to make it. 

And this rule applies across the board, whether I’m talking about an idea for a book or a style of parenting or the kind of person I want to be. I have to make it exist, before I even really know how it’s going to turn out. 

For a story, this means I have to start writing. So even if the words start off uninspired, or awkward, or when I go to read back what I’ve spent the last hour laboring over only to find that it’s so far from my initial vision I begin to doubt my literacy skills entirely, I have to keep going. My trick? I write 500 bad words. 

That’s right — I go for nil, just to get over that mental block about getting started. I go for quantity well over quality, and purposefully write utter garbage — the most terrible, embarrassing, absolutely uninspiring words I can — and I don’t stop until I reach 500.

“I go for nil, just to get over that mental block about getting started. I go for quantity well over quality, and purposefully write utter garbage.”

Some days, it’s a slog. Some days, I can’t get to 500 fast enough, and I close my laptop and flee the moment I’m finished. 

But some days I make myself laugh. Sometimes I write something so tragic I end up leaning into it, and I write well past 500, cackling the whole time. Sometimes I find myself writing back to something that’s not so terrible at all. 

The thing isn’t going to write itself. It isn’t going to get better by magic. It needs me to keep showing up, to keep trying, to keep figuring it out. Because if I didn’t do that, it would never actually exist.

“The thing isn’t going to write itself. It isn’t going to get better by magic. It needs me to keep showing up.”

You can’t, as Jodi Picoult once said, edit a blank page. You can, however, edit a bad one. 

And here’s the secret: Art happens in revision. We work in drafts, in layers — we add and take away, trim and erase and redo and revise — and we keep going until something begins to take shape. At some point, the process of working it over slows into lighter touches, then tiny finishes. And then, sometimes well before we realize it, it’s done. 

Visiting the dress-up trunk

All transitions, even objectively good ones, are uncomfortable. We might feel nervous, unsettled, or simply not prepared, but it’s also very likely that we feel this way because we might already be in the process of changing — whether we’ve consciously gotten on board yet or not.  

Growing up, I remember hearing the advice “Fake it till you make it.” I never loved the implied dishonesty in the verbiage, but the subtext appealed to me. For such a saying to exist, there must be a critical mass out there who feel like I do, who feel unprepared and scared, who have to put on a brave face every time they go out into the world and pretend like they’re owning it. It’s the imposter syndrome we all feel as the novice or the new kid, anytime we’ve taken a leap into a new role or phase of life. Anytime we’re in the process of coming-of-age.

There we are, at the crossroads, trying to figure out what we want next. What do you want to be? What do you want to do? 

“If we decide we’re going to experiment, maybe the better question is: How would it feel if…?“

If we decide we’re going to experiment, maybe the better question is: How would it feel if…? 

For example: How would it feel if I didn’t finish that novel? How would it feel if I wrote a new one? How would it feel if I changed the ending? Or the main character? Or the title?

What if becoming the next version of myself was as simple as putting on the thick-framed glasses I’ve always loved and spending the day working on edits in a coffee shop? What if becoming a novelist was as simple as sending the manuscript to a dozen agents? 

What if the answer to how we can show up as who we want to be isn’t about being ready or even really knowing what we want exactly — what if all that really matters is that we just show up at all? 

What if all it takes is the open, childlike willingness to dig around in the costume trunk and play a little bit with what we find in there? 

Maybe that’s all we really need to do at these moments: Try on whatever looks good to us, just to see if it fits. Then wear it around for a little while, and notice how it feels. 

“Try on whatever looks good to us, just to see if it fits. Then wear it around for a little while, and notice how it feels.”

Who knows what we will find when we start to play — when we give ourselves permission to relax, to feel whatever we feel. Maybe only then can we even see what it is we might want next.

Stephanie H. Fallon is a Contributing Editor at The Good Trade. She is a writer originally from Houston, Texas and holds an MFA from the Jackson Center of Creative Writing at Hollins University. She lives with her family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and she is the author of Finishing Lines, where she writes about her fear of finishing, living a creative life, and (medical) motherhood. Since 2022, she has been reviewing sustainable home and lifestyle brands, fact-checking sustainability claims, and bringing her sharp editorial skills to every product review. Say hi on Instagram or on her website.