All the Things I Didn’t Become

Sometimes I sit in the truck for a minute before going inside. The engine clicks as it cools, the dashboard lights fade, and the day lingers in the quiet between places. That brief moment, sitting alone in my truck, gives me a chance to take stock before the next thing begins.

When I was nine, I was determined to be a zoologist when I grew up. I had a whole menagerie at home: rabbits, pigeons, dogs, lizards, snakes, fish, and one cranky rat named Whiskers. (Creative, I know.) As a kid, I couldn’t put into words, but even then I was learning the importance of being reliable. Those animals couldn’t survive without me (mostly because I kept them caged where they couldn’t forage or hunt for themselves.)

By the ninth grade, I was sure I’d become a genetic engineer. I’d devoured Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park twice in three days, convinced that was what science looked like—possibility and awe wrapped in danger. A few years later, a terrible dream about testing my own experiments on myself changed everything. By senior year, I had moved on again. I would be a mechanical engineer, specializing in robotics. I had a professor who once said he wanted to build a prosthetic limb powered by a person’s own caloric energy. Literally, a battery charged by nerve impulses while you slept. I thought that was it. That would be my life.

But life, like most experiments, rarely goes as planned.

After college, I was making more money managing a warehouse than I could as an engineer, and I found I liked it more than I expected. I never became the kind of engineer who wore a security badge or a lab coat, but I used what I’d learned. How to build systems and use the problem-solving skills of school to make me good at my job of moving boxes.

Twenty-five years later, I’d worked with or around distribution companies my whole career, at one point for the largest independent wholesaler in the country. Eventually I helped start a solar company that grew faster than any of us could keep up with. One year, we did nearly forty million in revenue. I closed thirty of those myself, which I suppose should have made me proud. It mostly made me tired. Someone else got rich; I got ulcers, crippling anxiety, and an education.

Now I run a software company. Fifteen employees. We build tools for renewable energy companies and the same distributors I once worked for. It’s exhausting work. It keeps me up at night. I love it anyway.

I think about my younger self sometimes—the one who wanted to study animals, then genes, then machines. Those weren’t false starts. Each one was just a version of wanting to understand how things work, how they connect, and how to mend what’s broken.

Still, if you asked me what my real dream was, it wouldn’t have been any of those jobs. When I started dating the woman who would become my wife, my dream became doing what I needed to do to provide for her and my children. Just that.

And I’ve been blessed to be able to do that for almost 25 years.

The work I do pays for the life I get to live, but the meaning isn’t in the code or the contracts. It’s in the people who come home for Sunday dinners with their partners and those who fill the house at night. In the sound of laughter hanging in the air. In the way the ordinary things like folding laundry, making dinner, and sitting beside someone who loves you become the markers of a life that’s been enough.

I hope my children find their own measure of happiness in this strange and restless world. I’d love for them to hold on to our faith, to raise their own families inside it, but I don’t hold them to my dreams. I just want them to find peace. To build good things. To be kind when the world tries to make them hard.

The house lights spill across the driveway when I finally step out of the car. Inside, someone laughs. The air smells faintly of dinner and dish soap. I stand there for a moment, thinking about all the things I never became and how, somehow, what’s left feels like exactly what it should be.

And that is enough.