When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
My answer:
I think I must have asked similar questions in the past, but can’t remember exactly so it must’ve been quite long ago. Well, as for me, I had a lot of ideas over time. When I was very little, it was a no-brainer. I liked to sing and sang a lot, so I wanted to be a singer or a musician, or as I sometimes hilariously phrased it “do a career”. 😀 Then my brain changed spectacularly or something and I was like a completely new Bibiel, and I no longer liked to sing. Or rather, I still did, but not on stage or to entertain the family or anything like that. Now that I think of it deeper, I also think little Bibiel had a relatively brief time when she wanted to be a doctor. I was as much into medicine as it’s possible for a preschool kid, maybe even a little more, and what made it cool to me was that my grandad was a sort of family quack. In the sense that he generally has a lot of knowledge on a lot of different things, and that includes medical stuff, so when someone in our house or my maternal family is sick but doesn’t think they’re like super sick that they need to the hospital right away, typically the first thing that they do is call grandad to examine them and give some initial opinion on whether this is serious enough that you should see a doctor to get an antibiotic or whether it’s unnecessary, or he does cupping and things like that. And he initially said that I’m going to be the one to carry on his legacy, though he was joking more than anything else of course. I mean I can do cupping for example, but only with silicone cups, and these are way less effective than glass cups in my experience at both ends of cupping, and a lot less fun, but obviously I wouldn’t be able to use glass cups since you need fire for that. And it’s my cousin who’s studying medicine now so it would make more sense for him to keep the family quacking going too. But all that felt really cool and fascinating to me as a kid, so I wanted to not only be like my grandad but also be a proper, actual doctor. I think someone made me realise quite quickly though that this won’t really be a possibility given that I’m blind. 😀
For a long time, also since very early childhood, I wanted to work in a radio. I really don’t know what the whole deal with radio is, it’s weird, but literally gazillions of blind people have an obsession with the radio as children. And for some it stays and they become radio geeks, in one way or another. I guess for me it’s waned a lot over time, but I guess I’m still more interested in it than your average peep and a sort of more conscious radio listener if that makes sense. Initially, I wanted to be a radio presenter, and I played pretend radio a whole lot. Later on though, I figured that I wouldn’t really make all that great a presenter and wouldn’t even enjoy it much probably, so I started to think that I’d like to be a sound engineer. That sounds a lot more fun, at least in theory. I actually got to have a taste of that, because my late friend Jacek of Helsinki, who was back then still Jacek of Poland, invited me for a while to kind of informally collaborate with their academic radio station where I got to help out with sound engineering a bit, and, yes, that was very interesting, but eventually I concluded it’s not really for me in practice.
When my depression peaked when I was about ten, I kept telling everybody that I wanted to be a nun. But not really because suddenly I thought that was my true vocation. I did find some aspects of it interesting, but mostly, I just felt like everything was utterly pointless, and I couldn’t imagine how I would possibly be able to have a normal life. Being a nun, in a structured setting where you’re basically told what to do, have a fairly stable life and don’t really need any particular, or at least predefined, skills, felt like the obvious option, especially that the blind school that I went to for most of my education was led by nuns. Cynical for a kid probably, but that’s just how it was. Additionally, the surgery that I had that year sort of triggered some weird spiritual state for me, so I was kind of more drawn to all things prayer but in hindsight I can tell you that it was in a rather neurotic and not very mentally healthy way. Except being a nun was also problematic as I learned eventually, and not only because I didn’t have an actual vocation. There may have been a lot of blind nuns in history but currently, from what I know, there are not many religious orders that accept blind people. I only know of two or three, and I didn’t really feel drawn to their spirituality as much as some others. I even got a lexicon of religious orders from my godmother, reading of which I found equally fascinating and depressing. Later on our Sofi also had a wannabe-a-nun phase and read it with a lot of curiosity, but I guess in her case it was a bit more authentic.
As a teenager, I wanted to be a psychologist. I wasn’t as passionate about psychology as I had been about the radio thing, but I did find a lot of its aspects interesting from a relatively early age, and I’d heard of several blind people who went on to be psychologists, so I figured that was a viable option. I didn’t even really know what I’d be able or even want to do as a psychologist, because the only psychologists I knew worked with children or did semi-therapy, yet I’d also heard that psychologists can do a whole lot of other things, and I didn’t think I’d actually like to do therapy sessions when I don’t even know how to do peopling. Also at that time I didn’t really get to develop my linguistic interests properly and had to suppress them all the time. I had to stop my Swedish learning for a long time as I wasn’t able to continue it for practical reasons, and it felt insanely frustrating, so I preferred to force it out of my mind rather than keep yearning for Swedish all the time and have no way of pursuing it. But at least I always had a ready answer when someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I remember one teacher asked me that, and when I answered, he was like: “But you know you won’t help yourself or fix your own problems by studying psychology, right?” I suppose he just said that because, well, that’s what a lot of people do, study psychology to better understand themselves or something. But, as it happened, I did have a lot of weird problems at the time, and that remark made me feel really threatened. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I always feel threatened or really insecure when I think that people know about me more than I tell them, or try to figure out what I’m thinking or feeling. Like, my brain thinks it’s okay for me to “x-ray” people, analyse them, draw conclusions based on that etc. but other people are not allowed to do that with me. 😀 So I think I just calmly answered that yes, I know that, but his comment made my brain all messy for quite some time. Once I was able to clean it up, I figured that nope, no psychology for Bibielz. 😀
I also wanted to be a writer on and off. I wrote my first, hm… not sure how to call it… collection of short stories? Mini novel? Anyway, I wrote it when I was eight, and it was about Parpills – creatures that I made up. – A staff member at the boarding school who worked in our group at the time was really supportive of my writing endeavours, and later on also one school teacher, so I think that really helped me to carry on beyond the Parpills. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve always had some kind of diary, but usually my diaries didn’t last long and I didn’t stick to one single style of diary writing for long. The one I have now was started five years ago so it’s the longest-living diary I’ve ever had and I don’t plan on getting rid of it any time soon, and reading past entries doesn’t make me cringe, so it feels like a huge success. From what I recall of the first one, it was pretty cringey. When in inclusion school, I wrote a sort of novel or whatever, in the style of a diary, about some teenage girl called Milenka. It was supposed to be similar to the writing of Małgorzata Musierowicz and her series Jeżycjada, I wanted Milenka’s family to be something like the Borejko family of Jeżycjada, a bit eccentric but homey and relatable, and I tried to copy Musierowicz’s writing style, but it didn’t really work out. Probably because Jeżycjada is written in third-person narration unlike Milenka’s diary, and Musierowicz’s narrator writing doesn’t feel much like that of a teenage girl. And it was generally really overdone. Most people had super rare names, which felt unrealistic and dialogues were really cringeworthy from what I recall. And Milenka herself, especially compared with her overly colourful family, seemed rather blank and devoid of personality. At the same time I also wrote some totally weird series, the purpose of which I don’t even remember myself, anyway they were letters of various fictional characters to one fictional guy called Jacek Bisowski (Bisowski as in BIS), who was away God knows where, but somewhere abroad and no one seemed to know when or if he’ll even come back home. The people who wrote to him were various women in his life – his mother, wife etc. – Later on I started writing short stories, and was highly inspired by those of L.M. Montgomery (‘cause yes, Montgomery wrote LOADS of short stories and we Polish speakers are lucky that most if not all of them have been published in various collections of her short stories whereas it doesn’t seem to be a thing with the English originals, you just have to hunt them down somehow). I now write short stories a lot less frequently but I guess she’s still a huge influence for me. So while I didn’t think very highly of my writing and usually deleted things right after I wrote them so I didn’t have to cringe reading them later, I always liked the idea of being a writer, and, unlike most other things that I wanted to be before, it seemed relatively doable. I liked to entertain myself with the imagining of myself as an adult, being some kind of hermit living in some remote, rural place near the sea and cliffs (usually it was somewhere in Ireland since it was when my Celtic interests started to emerge), writing all kinds of different books of various genres, each genre under a different pen name. 😀 But yeah, while I did like to write, and still do, even though I write a lot less fiction these days, as I said I never really felt confident about my writing, so the dream never worked out. 😀
Ever since I started to use the computer and other electronic devices more extensively, I’ve had some interest in speech synthesis and generally text to speech technology and solutions, though I didn’t have much clue about it in practice and I guess I still don’t, so it was largely just theoretical and limited to enjoying playing around with and testing different synths and learning about them. And since my parents were happy to spoil me and reasonably able to afford it, I had quite a large collection of speech synths that I owned and an even larger one of speech samples of those synths I’d never had. Sadly, I’ve lost some of them (such as my favourite Polish voice Jacek from Ivona, now part of Amazon), and now that I’m using a Mac my collection has become totally useless anyway. But yeah, I’ve always found it really interested how there are different kinds of speech synthesis, how speech synths are made etc. Via speech synthesis, I also became mildly interested in all kinds of chatbots as a teenager, because many of them use some kind of TTS. So I often thought that it would be neat if I got to do something with speech synthesis and/or chatbots, like that I would make chatbots for all kinds of people: elderly people who live alone and have no one to talk to, bored children, mentally or physically ill people, people who don’t have anyone to practice a language with, people with intellectual disabilities etc. But while, as I often say, as a blind person, I kind of have to have more knowledge on all things tech than an average sighted person, basically to be able to even browse the Internet, I’m still nowhere near that knowledgeable to actually be able to do such things. And they lie dangerously close to maths so I’m not sure I’d actually even enjoy them in practice, unless the purely linguistic aspect or something.
I guess it was when I first read a book by Jurgen Thorwald about the history of neurosurgery (which doesn’t seem to have an English translation but the title of the Polish translation in English would be The Fragile House of the Soul), that I first thought: “Damn, the brain is so cool!” Around that time, I talked a lot to my horse riding instructor, who apart from being a horse riding instructor and hippotherapist is also lots of other things, including a neurologist, and we often chatted about all things brain. And I think it was thanks to these two things that I started to think that I’d really like to be a neurosurgeon. It’s still something that I’d really really like to do. But it’s not like I’m losing my sleep over it and frantically looking for some miraculous cure to “un-blind” me so I can become a brain surgeon. Honestly I’m not even sure I’d be able to be a good brain surgeon even if I could see, given my shitty fine motor skills and other weird-brainedness which I don’t think is entirely a result of blindness.
Lastly, since I was very young, a lot of people had been telling me that I should become a translator. I guess the first person who told me that was my parents’ architect who was helping with building our house. I don’t even remember the context in which she said it but I clearly remember that she said that she thinks I’m going to be a translator. For a very long time, I totally didn’t like the idea and it annoyed me that so many people kept throwing it at me. The only thing I could associate with being a translator was going to all kinds of meetings and stuff where you translate back and forth what both sides are saying, because the only translator I knew as a small kid was one who visited us regularly at preschool together with people from the Italian embassy, as they liked our preschool and sponsored things for us and stuff. I think I only started to warm up to the translator idea when I was… seventeen I guess? Definitely not an adult yet… And I got a faza on Cornelis Vreeswijk and consequently my Swedish got off the leash. One day, an idea popped into my brain, on how the first four lines of his song “Vaggvisa För Bim, Cornelis och Alla Andra Människor på Jorden” (Lullaby for Bim, Cornelis and all the Other People on Earth), could be translated into Polish with rhymes. I thought it was funny, and later when I went home from school for a weekend, I thought I’d try to translate more of it. And despite I hadn’t been learning Swedish for six years and my Swedish felt very rusty, I was able to translate it whole. I was on an absolute high after I did that. It was by no means perfect, but generally I think it was surprisingly good for someone who hadn’t spoken the language in six years and hadn’t known it too well to begin with. I was able to correct some of those mistakes, but a lot of those things that I’d like to improve about it and consider not very good, I still don’t know how I could do it better, and I think they stem more from the fact that I have very limited experience regarding translating stuff that rhymes, rather than something with my Swedish as such. Since then, I started to think that I’d really like to share some of Vreeswijk’s work with Polish readers, especially his poems. I’ve translated several more, though usually it wasn’t as smooth as with “Vaggvisa för Bim…” and there are still a lot of translations on my Braille-Sense which I’d started but got stuck somewhere and didn’t know what to do next. I already wrote about it on here though that eventually, I realised that, for several different reasons, perhaps Bibiel translating Cornelis, and anyone translating Cornelis into Polish, is not as good an idea as I originally thought it to be. I still like the idea of being a translator though, if I really can’t be a brain surgeon or a baby name consultant, and my Swedish teacher always highly encouraged me to translate stuff even for fun, which I still happily do. Like when I see a really rotten Polish translation of an English or Swedish book, I take the original and try to translate at least a chapter to see if I can do it better. My Swedish teacher also realised that I may not be able to go to uni and stuff like that, and he kept saying that if you know a language well, then that’s what’s most important and the only thing that seriously counts if you want a job with that language, because when they’ll see that you can speak it, they won’t be able to say that you can’t even if you don’t have a degree in linguistics or that particular language. I always agreed with it, and to an extent I still do, it’s undeniably true when stated that way, but in practice, I now know that it seems highly unlikely that anyone will want to hire you if you don’t have a paper confirming that you know anything at all. I’ve tried doing freelance translating, but it feels near-impossible when on many websites where you can sell services, you have to submit a CV and write your qualifications to begin with and it’s not an option that you have none. 😀
So I guess these are all the things that Bibiel wanted to be as a child, or at least all that I can recall now.
How about you? And are you now what you wanted to be, or is it something you’d still like to be? 🙂
My Inner MishMash 