When I was seven, a relative asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said doctor. Everyone smiled. It was the correct answer—the answer that made adults nod with approval and pat your head.

When I was twelve, I changed my answer to engineer. More smiles. More nods. Still correct.

When I was eighteen, I said I wanted to be a writer. The smiles disappeared. Someone said, “But what will you actually do?” As if writing was not doing. As if only certain answers counted.

I am forty-seven now. I have been a teacher, a clerk, a failed businessman, a reluctant manager, and yes, occasionally, a writer. I have been none of these things completely and all of them partially. If that seven-year-old could see me now, he would be confused. I never became the doctor. I never arrived at the destination the question promised.

But here is what I have learned: the question itself was a trap.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” assumes that growing up is a place you reach. That identity is a destination you arrive at and then stay. That one day you wake up and say, “I have become. I am finished. I am now the thing I was always meant to be.”

This never happens. Not to anyone. Not ever.

My father was a government officer for thirty years. If you asked him what he was, he would have said: government officer. But that was only his job. In the mornings he was a gardener, tending plants with a patience he never showed at work. In the evenings he was a storyteller, inventing tales for us that had no ending. On weekends he was a frustrated artist, sketching faces he never showed anyone. He was a husband who did not know how to say he was sorry. He was a son who still, at sixty, wanted his dead mother’s approval.

Which of these was he? All of them. None of them completely. He was not a noun. He was a verb—constantly becoming, never finished, never the single thing any question could capture.

I think the question damages us. It teaches children that identity is singular. You must choose one thing and become it. Doctor or engineer or astronaut. As if a human being could be reduced to a profession. As if the vast, contradictory, ever-changing thing that is a person could fit into a single word.

The children who take this question seriously spend their twenties in crisis. They chose a path, walked it faithfully, and then discovered they were not the person who made that choice anymore. They became something else along the way—but the path remained the same. So they feel trapped. They feel they have failed at becoming. They do not realize the question was unanswerable from the start.

I know a woman who became a lawyer because at sixteen she said she wanted to be a lawyer. She hated every day of it. For fifteen years she practiced law while dreaming of something else. When I asked why she didn’t change, she said, “But I already became this. I can’t become something else now.”

She believed identity was a one-time transaction. You chose, you became, you stayed. The question had taught her this. And the teaching had imprisoned her.

The truth is messier. The truth is that we become something new every few years—sometimes every few months. The person I was at twenty-five would not recognize the person I am now. We share a name and some memories, but our fears are different, our hopes are different, our understanding of what matters is completely different. If he met me, he would think I had given up on things he held sacred. If I met him, I would want to warn him about mistakes he was about to make.

We are not the same person. We are a series of people, linked by memory and body, but distinct in almost every other way.

This should be frightening. In some ways it is. But it is also liberating.

If I am not a fixed thing, I cannot fail at becoming. There is no final exam. There is no destination I was supposed to reach by now. There is only the ongoing process of living, which changes me whether I want it to or not. I am not a project that can be completed. I am an experiment that continues until it ends.

My daughter is fifteen. Soon someone will ask her the question. What do you want to be when you grow up? I want to tell her the truth: you will not be one thing. You will be many things, some of them contradictory, most of them unexpected. The person you are now cannot imagine the person you will become. And that is fine. That is how it works. That is what being human means.

But I probably won’t say this. The question is too embedded. The adults around her expect a single answer. She will say something—doctor, engineer, artist, entrepreneur—and they will nod and smile and believe they have learned something about her future.

They will have learned nothing. Her future does not exist yet. She will create it as she goes, changing direction, abandoning paths, discovering interests she cannot currently imagine. She will become and become and become, never arriving, never finished.

This is not failure. This is life.

I have stopped asking myself what I want to be. The question no longer makes sense to me. I am already being—right now, in this moment. I am a man writing at a desk in the early morning. I am a father who will wake his daughter for school in an hour. I am a son who still misses his parents. I am a friend who has not called his friends in too long. I am a body that is slowly aging. I am a mind that is still curious.

Which of these is what I am? All of them. None of them permanently. Tomorrow some will change. Next year I might be unrecognizable.

The seven-year-old who said doctor did not fail. He simply became someone else—many someone elses—on the way to here. And here is not a destination either. Here is just where I happen to be standing while the becoming continues.

When I grow up, I want to be growing up still. That is the only honest answer. That is the only answer that acknowledges what we actually are: unfinished creatures, works in progress, rough drafts that never reach final form.

The question was always wrong.

The answer was always: I don’t know. I am finding out. I will tell you when I get there.

But I will never get there.

And that, I am finally learning, is perfectly fine.