When I was a kid, about 4 or 5 years old, I was at the barbers getting my hair cut. The barber was making small talk with my mother and I. He asked me “what do you want to be when you grown up?”. I panicked, nobody had ever asked me that before. I’d never even considered it. I didn’t have an answer. I assumed I’d have more time to ponder that in the future, but he is asking me now. I was a very nerdy know-it-all kid who always had the correct answer ready for any question that someone would ask me, but not this, I didn’t know what the correct answer was.
I wanted this barber to like me, he was a popular and well known barber in our town. I didn’t want to make something up the he disapproved of. So I said the only logical thing. “I want to be a barber when I grow up”. He was shocked. He said no kid has ever told him they want to be a barber before, and it’s an odd choice, be he was still pleased, so I did a good job.
The only problem was, now I had said that, I thought it was locked in, and I couldn’t change it anymore. So for a couple of years after that, whenever anyone asked me what I want to be when I grow up, I looked resigned, got sad and reluctantly said “a barber”.
Then when I was 8 I finally worked out I could change my choice, so I changed it to Chef, because I loved food and enjoyed cooking.
Now I’m neither a barber nor a chef.
Years of reading in bed late at night while exhausted have conditioned me to associate reading with falling asleep. I don’t have insomnia much anymore, often the opposite. Any time I want to lay down and read my book before bed, I’m out like a light before I finish a single chapter. It could be a super power, but it also means it takes me months to finish a single novel. Also not ideal when I occasionally need to read reports or training materials at work and get to the end and my head is on the desk and I can’t keep my eyes open.