You May Already Be

Living the Life of Your

Childhood Dreams
After poring over a book about the solar system, our 5-
year-old informed us that when he grows up he’d like to
be an astronomer, but also a drawing guy—he meant an
artist—and a school guy (i.e. a teacher).

An
illustration of the solar system I did with my son.

Source: Adam Stern/Procreate

Making sense of it all

Our son makes a lot of offhand comments just as he’s

supposed to be getting into bed. It’s often a
procrastination technique, but this comment landed a
little differently with me. He’s trying to understand how
the
world works, and the inputs to this complex equation
are everything in his ever-expanding universe. This was a
little boy trying to reconcile that week’s excitement about
the planets and the moon, and the sun with the rest of his
day spent coloring pictures in school.

I kissed the top of his head and told him I thought it was
a great plan, but then he asked if he could really do that
—be an astronomer, a teacher, and an artist—and I didn’t
know what to say. There just aren’t many people who
get
paid to gaze at the stars and teach and draw. My wife
jumped in to tell him that maybe he could teach
astronomy to his future students.

“And you could draw for fun like Daddy does,” I added,
referring to my hobby of drawing gag cartoons about
psychiatry and life in general.

Our son was wholly unimpressed, especially the drawing

like Daddy part.

“No, I think that every week I’ll work for three days as
an astronomer, and one day as a drawing guy, and one
day as a school
guy.”

With the decision made, he was able to settle into bed,

but his question stayed with me. Is 5 years old the right
age to inject reality into his dreams? It couldn’t be, but
when does a parent come to own the dour responsibility
of stomping on a child’s perfectly harmless
fantasies?

My own winding road

I thought back to my own meandering path. At age 5, I

told my parents I wanted to be a doctor so I could work
with my father in his office. I seem to remember them
telling me I could be whatever I wanted to be if I worked
hard enough, and they got me a Fisher-Price doctor kit.
With this mantra engrained in my
1980s to 1990s
upbringing, it’s become my natural stance whenever our
son thinks about his own future.
This was the pinnacle of my baseball career.

Source: Roslyn Little League, c. 1992

By age 8, I was
going to be a baseball player, but this
fantasy would not last even through middle school.

By high school, I was enjoying psychology classes and

was writing for the paper, so I thought I’d be a
psychologist or a columnist for a newspaper. In college, I
watched movies on repeat and wanted to write
screenplays that would become smash hits in Hollywood.
Unfortunately, none of the stuff I wrote as a college kid
in Providence gained any traction with agents in Los
Angeles. The rejections
scorched me to my core, and I
did my best to reassure myself, okay, this is kind of like
not getting to be a professional baseball player. It’s okay.
What’s next? Then I decided to go to medical school and
wrote an essay pronouncing that I had wanted to be a
doctor since I was 5.

The author just after adorning his white coat for the first
time.

Source: Adam Stern

In those next four years, I kept writing but was more

focused on short stories about medicine. I was struck by
how rich the world
of medicine was in interpersonal
drama, character arcs, and pathos. The work of caring for
real people inspired great stories and the experiences I
had let me practice the art of perceiving people’s stories
and reflecting back what I saw. It was a particularly
useful skill to have cultivated when I decided to
specialize in psychiatry, where much of the job seems to
be dependent upon perceiving and reflecting. No field of
medicine is so foundationally built upon people’s stories.

An
insider's perspective on living with cancer

At age 33, a grown-up by anyone’s standard—especially

by my son’s, who recently guessed that I was either 100
or 17 years old—I was dealt an unexpected blow in the
form of kidney cancer. In an instant, I had gained the
novel and unwelcome perspective of a seriously ill
patient while remaining in full possession of my medical
knowledge.

Self Portrait

Source: Adam Stern

At the same time, I used writing to understand my own
experience better. Whenever I felt like crying or
screaming or even jumping for joy, I put those feelings
into essays. I know from my work in psychiatry that
putting
thoughts and emotions onto the page help to
process and integrate them into one’s own psyche. Only
then can we move forward or even grow from them.

It was after reading a piece of mine online that a literary

agent first approached me, and together we put together a
book proposal about finding love and human connection
over the course of my
psychiatric training. That book by
the sheer serendipity of the universe ended up being
featured in People magazine, and now I’m working with
a team in Hollywood to see if we can make a show out of
it.

Finding my book review in People magazine.

Source: Adam Stern

As I was about to leave my son’s room and turn off the

light, I paused.

“You know, bud, I’m kind of like a doctor and a writer

and a drawing guy so I think you really can do
anything
when you’re grown up.”

“I know,” he replied, suddenly sounding very tired.

“Night night.”

“Okay. Night.”

Unable to be tamed, planned, or timed,

childhood dreams are still worth embracing

Some dreams are ever so far out of reach no matter how

much support we have, and life can be torturously
unpredictable. But when I stop to remember all of the
journey, so much of my life has turned out just the way I
hoped. I think of my own parents’ encouragement with
gratitude and know that not everyone has that message
engrained within them. Wherever the line exists to mark
the end of fantasy and the beginning of setting realistic
expectations, I haven’t found it yet, and truly I hope I
never do.
PDF's generated at: Thu Sep 15 2022 07:56:00
GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Source:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/stern-
talk/202209/you-may-already-be-living-the-life-your-
childhood-dreams