Disruptive Empathy

Disruptive Empathy

What Do You Want to Be?

The memory of ambition

Eric Near's avatar
Eric Near
Feb 10, 2026
∙ Paid

When you are a child (especially one whose brain is wired to find patterns in the chaos of a sensory-rich world) the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” feels less like an inquiry and more like a high-stakes architectural requirement. For those of us on the spectrum, we often interpret that question with a literalism that the neurotypica…

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