“What do you want to be when you grow up”
Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a familiar piece of adult small talk that Lindy West recasts as a demand to imagine a future amid uncertainty. For her, the question’s force changes over time: what first invites a child to name an ambition eventually exposes how little room culture has made for someone like her to picture becoming herself.
A Stock Question with Existential Weight
West opens by making the prompt sound far more consequential than its casual use suggests. Asked of a child, it can seem to require a plan for navigating an uncertain future, even while the child is still occupied with the immediate oddities of childhood. The joke makes the mismatch visible: adults reach for a ready-made question, while the child has no reason to possess a settled answer.
Early Answers and the Disappearing Future
There was a time, West says, when she could answer readily. She imagined being a ballerina, or briefly a veterinarian, having mistaken the job for professional animal-petting. Learning what veterinary work actually involved ended that plan. These early ambitions belong to a remembered period of unselfconscious possibility; West says that version of herself is now so distant that she cannot readily recall being her.
From Ambition to Identity
As West grew older, the question stopped opening onto a range of imaginable futures. She could not picture herself as a doctor, firefighter, princess, or astronaut, and she points to the cultural messages that taught her what she was not: small, thin, pretty, girlish, normal, weightless. The obstacle was not simply choosing a career. As a fat child, she could find little representation of young, funny, capable, strong fat girls in television, films, games, theater, or books. Against that absence, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” gives way to the more pressing question “What are you?” The expression thus marks a shift from childhood aspiration to a struggle for a recognizable identity and a future one can imagine inhabiting.
