If you think about it, asking someone at 22 what they want to be for the rest of their life is a ridiculous question. You’ve barely been out in the world on your own.
You’ve spent most of your life moving through schools, classes, schedules, and expectations somebody else designed for you.
Then you graduate, get handed all this freedom, and everyone starts acting as if you should immediately know what to do with it.
I remember the feeling. Not confusion, exactly. More like the suspicion that there was an answer I was supposed to have by then, and the fact that I didn’t meant something was wrong with me.
It didn’t.
You’ve been somebody this entire time, you just didn’t have a title for it
You had things you loved as a kid. Things you couldn’t stand. People you felt comfortable around and people who made you smaller. You had places where you felt like yourself and places where you performed a version of yourself that fit better.
You had interests you dropped and came back to. Versions of yourself that worked for a while and then didn’t. A sense of humor that was always yours, even when everything else was shifting.
None of that is nothing. That’s a person. The problem is that nobody counts it. When people ask what do you want to be, they mean a job, a title, a thing that fits on a form.
They don’t mean who are you, even though that’s the question underneath the question.
And a lot of what you want at that age is shaped by whatever world you happened to grow up inside. Your family has ideas about success. Your school rewards certain things. Your friends are all moving in the same general direction.
So by the time you finally have enough freedom to ask what you want for yourself, everyone acts like you’re late for not already knowing.
You weren’t late. You were just arriving at the question for the first time.
22 is an absurd age to ask someone a permanent question
At 22, you’ve barely had a chance to try anything. You don’t know what kind of work makes you lose track of time and what kind makes the hours feel like cement. You don’t know whether you liked the city or liked college.
You don’t know if the career you picked sounds right because you want it or because you’ve been saying it since junior year and now everyone expects you to follow through.
You haven’t had the bad boss yet, the one who shows you what kind of authority you can’t tolerate. You haven’t had the job that looked perfect on paper and made you miserable by month three.
You haven’t lived alone, or been broke on your own terms, or woken up in a city where nobody knows your name and realized that was either thrilling or terrifying, and you couldn’t have predicted which.
And somehow you’re supposed to answer a question as permanent as what do you want to be with no evidence. That’s not a fair question. It’s a setup.
I spent years thinking everyone else had some clarity I’d missed. Looking back, most of them were trying things too. They sounded more confident while they did it.
More Bolde Stories
The difference between a calling and momentum is mostly the story you tell about it later
A lot of people who look like they “knew” didn’t start with a vision. They started with a door that happened to be open. Somebody gets an internship because a professor mentioned it. It turns into a job.
They’re decent at it, the paycheck is steady, and staying is easier than starting over. Five years in, they call it a career. Ten years in, they call it a path.
Twenty years in, they tell the story like it was inevitable.
That doesn’t make the life fake. But it does mean the clean origin story usually gets written after the fact. We love making things sound like they were always the plan once we know how they turned out.
Someone picks a major because the intro class was interesting and the professor remembered their name. Someone moves for a relationship and builds a whole life in a city they never planned on.
Someone stays in a field because leaving would mean starting from scratch at 34, and the math didn’t make sense even though the work stopped fitting years ago.
From the outside, all of that looks like direction. From the inside, it was mostly one decision leading to the next available decision, and the momentum doing the rest.
The calling is what they named it after it was already built. At the time, it was just the thing that was in front of them.
Who you want to be is supposed to keep changing
I’ve always struggled with this idea that there’s some final version of me I’m supposed to be working toward, because every time I’ve gotten close to one version, life changed and I changed with it.
The things I wanted at 25 weren’t the things I wanted at 35. The person I needed to become in one season of my life wasn’t the person I wanted to stay forever.
Some of the identities I wore for years stopped fitting, and the discomfort wasn’t a crisis. It was information. It was my life telling me that the answer I gave at 28 wasn’t the answer anymore, and that was allowed.
I wish someone had told me that earlier. Not that the answer would change, but that it was supposed to. That the changing was the process working, not the process failing.
Who do I want to be is a much better yearly question than a one-time question you’re expected to answer before your brain is even finished developing.
The answer gets to be revised. You get to cross things out. You get to look at a choice you made ten years ago and say that was right for then, and it’s not right for now, and both of those things are fine.
And yes, some people do know early. There are people who wanted to be doctors at twelve and became doctors and still love it at fifty. That’s real, and it’s worth respecting.
The mistake is turning their story into proof that everybody else should have one that clean. Knowing early is one way to build a life.
It isn’t evidence that uncertainty means you’re behind.
I think I spent too much time asking what I was supposed to become and not enough time noticing who I already was. If you still don’t have one clean answer, I don’t think that means you’ve failed to figure it out.
It probably means you’re still paying attention. Still noticing when a chapter has run its course. Still open to the next thing, even if you can’t see it from here.
And I’d rather keep changing the answer than spend a lifetime protecting one I picked before I knew myself well enough to choose.
Editor’s Note: “As Told to Bolde” stories are inspired by reader submissions, interviews, and accounts shared with our editorial team. Details are often changed, combined, or dramatized, and our editors use AI tools in the writing process. See our Editorial Policy.
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