What do I really want to do?

What do I really want to do? 

I don’t know. I’ve never really known. If you had asked me, when I was a little kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would not have had an answer for you. I suppose if you had really pressed me on it, I may’ve said something like a policeman, a fireman, or astronaut. Not that I actually wanted to be any of those things, but those were the answers I had heard to that question. I can’t really remember anyone asking me that as a kid. They must have, right? That’s what adults ask kids.  Anyway... 

Later, as a teen, I didn’t have any strong feeling about a career. At some point, I thought maybe I could be a therapist. That may have been when I was in therapy. But, again, it wasn’t like a burning desire within me. I was writing music by that point, and I guess I liked it, so I started college as a music composition major. But even then, I don’t think I saw that as what I really wanted to be. It was just something that I did. I ended up switching to psychology, as I thought it was something I could maybe stand to do, but I continued studying composition as well. 

I never had a plan. Literally no one ever asked me what was my career plan. I never even heard terms like “5-year plan” or “10-year plan” until later when I was working at some schools. It really seems like someone, a teacher or an advisor sometime during high school or college, should have asked me that. Should have asked me what I wanted to do with my life. But I don’t remember that ever happening. And I’m pretty sure my parents never asked. Maybe I seemed like one of those students who did well, so everyone just assumed I had my act together in terms of a career path. But obviously I didn’t. 

There was some point, I think maybe my fourth year in college, when I was aware that I didn’t really know what I was doing, and I thought I might actually quit school for a bit and try to figure things out. But the few people that I talked to about that told me it was a bad idea and that I should finish a degree in something, anything, whatever I was the closest to finishing at that point. So, I stuck around another year (+) and got a degree in psychology, with a gigantic minor in music. I had more music hours than psych hours, but undergrad psychology is a pretty easy degree, and undergrad music is not. (Sometimes, when people find out I have a psychology degree, they’ll ask if I ever use it. And I’ll say, “Sure! I work with crazy people all the time - singers, dancers, actors.”) 

I ended up playing music for a living. It wasn’t really a choice I made because that was what I wanted to be. It’s just something that started when I was in college. My composition teacher told me, “Go play in jazz band, it’ll be good for you. Go play for dance classes, it’ll be good for you. Go accompany the opera, it’ll be good for you.” He meant those things would be good for me as a composer, and they definitely were. But I also discovered I could play music and people would pay me money for it. And that was nice, so that’s what I did. It just sort of happened. And accompanying led to doing musical theater, and that led to being an assistant music director and then music director. Once again, I don’t think it that was something I decided I wanted to be, it just sort of happened. 

So, I’m a freelance musician, and it’s hard to make a decent living at that. Especially if you don't feel a really strong drive to keep working at it because it’s really what you love doing. I still write music – sometimes classical stuff, sometimes theatre. I’ve never seen a way to really make money at that unless I were writing pop music for famous pop stars or big budget film scores, and I’m not actually interested in writing either of those kinds of things. About 10 or 12 years ago I started taking pictures. I like doing that, and I wish I could do it more. But even though every now and then people have paid me for photos, I don't see a way to regularly make money at it, at least not with the sort of pictures that I take and want to take. Anyway, I don’t know if that’s what I “want to be.” 

Now, I’m approaching old age. I turned 50 a few years ago and I have no money, no savings, not much of anything. I’m really just scraping by. It’s not like I spend money unwisely. It’s that I don’t really have money to spend in the first place. I’m not starving, or unable to pay the bills. But I don’t have a safety net nor a retirement plan. Several times in the past 15 or so years I have thought about maybe trying to find a “normal” job – a non-music job. But I’m not even sure what jobs there are out in the world. And, while there are some skills I have developed as a musician and music director, I’m not sure how they would translate to the normal job market. I’ve never been any good at convincing people to do things for me, so how do I convince someone to hire me with no background in a normal work environment? 

If you were to ask me now, what is it that I really want to do? 

Nothing? I don’t know. I’ve never really known.