The Reality of “Dream Jobs”

Leah Marshall
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

“What’s your dream job?”

I’ve been asked this since preschool, and it’s changed tenfold since then. It’s our go-to question we ask when trying to get a feel for someone, in both professional and personal settings. Some people are very certain, and their answers are very clear cut — accountant or reporter or doctor.

I am happy for those that are sure of what they are going to do. But I’m not sure when the dream job question began, and I’m not sure how to answer it myself. I’d like to preface this all with I know that I’m privileged. I’m very fortunate to have gone to a good university and just graduated — but as someone who put herself through college and has debt that needs to be paid, I feel a surmounting pressure to find a job and do something that I love. So what is my dream job?

Do we ever really have one? We, as human beings, are constantly evolving and changing. And as I said before, since my sheepish “chef” answer in preschool, it’s switched easily a dozen times. I don’t want to stay the same for so long that I end up blindly following one goal just because it’s been so long that I feel obligated to stick with it.

Writing has always been in me. I will forever see it as one of the most inherent and important parts of me. My thoughts jumble up in a mess of sentences that I need to take down, and that’s the way it’s always been. My mind is moving faster than I can write, and I always hope that my fingers can catch up. For the majority of college, I thought I wanted to write for my career, and that was what I told everyone. But how are we telling people what our dream jobs are if we haven’t ever done it in a real-world setting? What made a girl that had no experience with writing other than filled notebooks and hundreds of Word documents on her computer think she had any idea what it’d be like to write professionally?

And truth be told, I’m scared. I don’t want the foundation of me to be ripped to pieces by the ruthless anonymity of the internet. A part of me that I’m giving to others, to hope that they’ll feel something. My most internal reasoning of why I want to share what I write is that I hope that someone will feel something — comfort, or happiness or escape. I don’t want to have to forgo my overuse of the dash or my short, choppy sentences. We always talk about how important it is to have a “voice,” when writing but now it feels like a lot of those voices online are using the same autotune.

In society it seems like our value is what we can produce based on the skills that we are born with — hard work is no doubt necessary to succeed, but I can assure you, no matter how hard I tried, I don’t think you’d want me as your investment banker. It’s not the way my mind works. It’s important to establish who we are as a person aside from what we do — maybe we don’t have to fulfill our passions through our careers. Maybe it’d make us jaded, and maybe we want to savor that favorite part of us forever.

Nobody tells you any of this when you go to college and you’re trying to pick out your major or when you change it in the advisor’s office for the first or second time or maybe the third. And they don’t tell you when you move the tassel from right to left. I’m hoping that me realizing it before I’m employed will help me in this search — that I owe it to myself to not burn myself out on what l see as my “skill.” Maybe we should start by asking the preschoolers, “what kind of person do you want to be?” and then let the rest follow suit over time.

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