What do you see yourself doing five years from now?

As a naïve young person, I had a hard time envisioning my future and figuring out what I wanted to be. My main interests were art, writing poetry, and cooking, but none of those were “real jobs.” It was perfectly fine that I was interested in those things, but it felt silly and immature to think they could be part of My Actual Future. But I didn’t really want to do anything else.

So the question, “What do you see yourself doing five/ten/twenty years from now?” would catch me like a deer in the headlights. I had no idea, no ability to foresee what my life would be, and when I tried imagining myself with a standard desk job, in a marriage, or with a family, my vision was so abstract that the person I was imagining didn’t seem like me at all.

I thought something was dreadfully wrong with me. Did I lack imagination? Did I have no ambition? No life goals? I must have been fundamentally broken. How did I not have the same clear picture that other people seemed to have of what they would be doing a set number of years into the future?

The things that people were supposed to want — a career climbing up the corporate ladder, money, marriage, kids — none of that played into anything I envisioned for myself. I didn’t want any of that. And if I didn’t want THAT, there didn’t seem to be any kind of guidance for what a different path might look like.

Where might I have gotten that guidance so I wasn’t left floundering? My family, religion, a career counselor?

My parents, thankfully, didn’t place any limitations on me due to my gender or nudge me down a path to getting married and having kids. But I also don’t remember being given any directives to select a “real job” and study at University towards that. They didn’t bat an eye or give me a lecture about supporting myself when I first majored in creative writing, then switched to art. I guess we all kind of thought I’d figure something out, eventually. This laissez-faire attitude was suitable because in the 1990s, a person could get herself a barely-above-minimum-wage job and actually afford a small apartment, a used car payment, and food while she figured out what she wanted to do with her life.

And religion? Luckily I escaped its influence. Because I had bitched and complained on a weekly basis about being forced to attend church for so long, at age 13 I was given the option of stopping (which I immediately did, to my father’s everlasting disappointment). So I wasn’t part of a religious community that would likely have tried to steer me down the path of “your role is to find a husband, be submissive, and squirt out a bunch of babies.” Although if you know me, you know that I get my hackles up when people try to tell me what to think, and so I doubt that the church would have actually been able to influence my life path in that way, had I continued attending.

And as far as career counseling, when I took a career aptitude test in high school (or was it college? the memories are muddy), my counselor told me that my results indicated that I should be a forest ranger. At the time I was arrogantly dismissive of the very idea. Me, trampling around in the wilderness, shooing bears away from campsites and NOT using my Incredible Creative Skills to dazzle the world with my poetry and paintings? The horror.

The guidance I needed never came. I graduated with excellent grades, a degree in psychology I did not plan to use, minor-equivalents in studio art and poetry, and absolutely no idea — STILL — of what I was going to do in life. What did I see myself doing in five years? NO CLUE.

I wish someone had told me, “Hey, it’s okay! You’re not broken. You don’t have to want that ambitious career and a white picket fence and 2.5 children. You don’t have to have it all figured out right this second. Find a way to earn a paycheck, enjoy your time with friends, continue to expand your mind, spread kindness. You’ll get there in your own time and eventually you’ll be able to see future you.”

Fast forward 30 years. I have been paid to be both an artist and a writer. I’m not a chef (thank god I did not follow that career path) but what I got paid to write was a cookbook, so I am counting that as a goal achieved. I eventually figured out what I’m good at and what I like to do that will also earn a modestly sustainable paycheck. I DO have a family! (Turns out I wanted that, just not on the timetable that society thought I should.)

I now have the ability to see where I want to be in five, ten, or twenty years. I have plans, and I have backup plans, and I have secret backup plans to those plans.

And at this point in my life, being a forest ranger sounds like a WONDERFUL career option, even if it’s likely I would have been fired by the Trump administration.