The Real Work of Growing Up

Discovering Who We Are Beyond Our Roles

As a kid, when adults asked: "What do you want to be when you grow up?", it felt like a test. My answers—"I want to climb trees and learn how to talk to birds" or "I want to draw and color beautiful pictures"—were met with amused smiles and gentle corrections.

"That’s nice," they’d say, "but what about being a doctor? A lawyer? A teacher? Something real?"

Over time, you learn the right answers. You adjust your thinking to match what’s expected. Eventually, you start believing the revised answer is your own, and the wild, boundless dreams of childhood fade into the background. Or at least for me, they did.

The Shaping of Identity

That’s the thing about growing up—at first, your world is shaped by others. Parents define what’s normal. School reinforces the idea that identity is tied to achievement. Grades measure your worth. Career Day outlines your future. The playground and art class, the places where joy was once enough, become side notes.

By high school, the things we love doing are repurposed as résumé builders, stripped of their magic. And then we grow up.

"What do you do?" replaces "What do you want to be?" We introduce ourselves by our professions, slipping so far into our roles that we forget who we are beyond them. Productivity becomes a measure of worth. A lost job can feel like a lost identity. And when success doesn’t come in the expected ways, we start to wonder if we’ve failed—or if we even know who we are.

The Unraveling

This unraveling of identity isn't always sudden. It happens in the quiet moments when the roles we once inhabited no longer define us.

For me, this realization hit hardest when my sons moved out to build their own lives. For so long, I had identified as their mother, their provider, their guide. When they no longer needed me in the same way, I felt unmoored. Who was I beyond motherhood?

I threw myself into work, then into caring for my mother. But when I lost my job and, shortly after, my mother passed away, I was left staring into a mirror, forced to reckon with the question I had spent a lifetime avoiding:

Who am I?

Beyond Productivity

We chase achievements, only to realize they don’t sustain us. We accumulate, we advance, we strive—until one day, we pause and wonder what it was all for. The world tells us that this reflection comes with age, that only after decades of running the race do we stop to look back.

But why should it take aging to understand that we are more than our accomplishments?

At the same time, identity isn’t just shaped by external labels. It’s also shaped by necessity. When I first entered the job market, it was out of survival. Fresh out of high school, in a new state, I needed to make money. College wasn’t free. Bills didn’t wait. I had been trained my entire life to believe that hard work equaled stability.

When I became a parent, work became even more central—a non-negotiable pillar of survival. Looking back, there were moments I missed with my sons that I wish I could reclaim. Sadly, at the time, I didn’t feel I had much of a choice.

Reclaiming Curiosity

Responsibilities left little room for choice. Dreams like travel or a bucket list felt unrealistic, pushed aside in favor of what was necessary. There was no time to indulge in "one day" daydreams when survival took priority.

Yet in clinging to the belief that identity was tied to productivity, I was also holding myself back from fully embracing life—not the kind measured by titles or achievements, but by presence and joy.

Only when I reclaimed my creative voice did I begin to rediscover my curiosity—about the world, about myself, and about what it truly meant to live a fulfilling life.

With curiosity rekindled, I now allow myself to dream again.

Black sand beaches. A pasta-making class. Salsa dancing.

Not as milestones of success, but as moments of joy.

A Shift in Perspective

My perspective has shifted. I still wrestle with the need for external validation, but I recognize now that internal validation carries more weight. People's opinions change. Societal expectations shift. But the regrets that linger, the ones that creep in late at night, are often tied to the moments we denied ourselves in favor of meeting others’ standards.

Growth isn’t a single transformation. It’s constantly unfolding. The idea of "becoming the best version of ourselves" is often thrown around, but is there a single "best" version? Or is growth an evolving process? Who I am today is different from who I was ten years ago, and it’ll be different ten years from now.

Redefining Growth

As a kid, I thought growing up meant trading wonder for responsibility. As an adult, I realize growing up was never the destination. It’s not about careers or roles. It’s about the choice to define myself not by what I do, but by who I am.

Now, I ask myself different questions:

Not "What have I achieved?" but "How have I lived?"
Not "What do I do?" but "Who am I becoming?"

Perhaps this is the real work of growing up—not reaching a final version of ourselves, but learning to embrace the journey, moment by moment.