What Do You Want to Be?
The memory of ambition
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 neurotypical world doesn’t quite intend. We don’t just want a job; we want to inhabit a system.
As a young person, my ambition wasn’t rooted in the typical markers of success like titles or corner offices. I wanted to understand how things fit together. I spent hours staring at the blinking cursor of a Commodore 64, typing out lines of BASIC just to see the screen change color. My inner child didn’t want to be a “Leader of Infrastructure” or a “Strategy Consultant.” I wanted to be a builder of worlds where the rules were consistent and the feedback was immediate.
The problem with the tech sector is that it takes that pure, obsessive childhood curiosity and tries to turn it into a quarterly roadmap. We enter the industry with a love for the Apple IIe and a fascination for how TCP/IP connects us across the void (only to find ourselves years later sitting in “strategic planning” meetings that feel like they are draining the very marrow from our bones).
Healing the inner child in this context isn’t about some nebulous, “woo-woo” concept of self-care. It is a technical debt exercise. For the ADHD-i mind, our ambition was often a sprawling, beautiful mess of interests that people called “distractions.” We were told to focus, to narrow our scope, and to pick a lane. We learned to mask our wandering thoughts to fit into a corporate culture that values a straight line over a fascinating detour.
To heal is to realize that the “what do you want to be” question was always a trap. It implies a finished state. It suggests that once you reach the destination (the “Director” level or the successful exit) the work is done. But for the autistic soul, the joy was always in the process. It was in the way a Lego brick clicked into place or the way a complex piece of Linux kernel code finally compiled without errors.
I am learning to look back at that younger version of myself (the one who sat in the back of the class drawing diagrams of space stations instead of doing long division) and tell them that their “lack of focus” was actually a superpower. We were never meant to be just one thing. We were meant to be the connective tissue between the machine and the human experience.
If we want to fix the burnout crisis in tech, we have to stop asking our employees to leave their childhood wonder at the door. We need to create space for the “special interests” that drive innovation. We need to remember that before we were “resources” or “headcount,” we were just kids who thought the World Wide Web was the closest thing to real magic we would ever see.