Daily Prompt – January 20, 2026

What’s your dream job?

My dream job has changed over the years. I don’t know that I necessarily have one any more. I love the job I have. It’s not perfect but no job is. I hope that most people realize that even if they get their dream jobs, they aren’t going to be the most perfect amazing experiences that we build them up to be in our heads.

When I was kid, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I still have a lot of interest in fashion. However, in my attempts to pursue the career, I learned I wasn’t truly cut out for it, At least not back then, Technology has changed and become a bigger part of the industry now and I might have had a different outcome but back then, my perceptual motor disorder which impacts my depth perception and ability to draw things proportionally was a major handicap to working in fashion.

Eventually, I moved on to my love of all things science and wanted to find the cure for AIDS. In general I wanted to work in medical research. I would still love to do that but life has taken me in a different direction that is still related but probably better for me in the long run. When that dream failed, I floundered for a bit in terms of dream jobs. I was aimless but I think it worked out ok.

I let life lead me to jobs. I worked as an administrative assistant which eventually led me to a career in IT which is how I discovered my next dream job. Working in the medical laboratory. It was research but doing the actual clinical testing. Helping people in real time but running tests that help diagnose conditions and make sure doctors make informed decisions about care and treatment plans.

That work, just through the natural course of the career, let me to my current work in Quality Assurance. I still work in clinical lab environments, just on the regulatory compliance side instead of the testing side. This is so good for my detail oriented, process oriented brain. So was the lab but the lab comes with time constraints that were hard on me if I got stuck on trying to figure the whys and hows of something. In QA work, the whys and hows are my job and there aren’t the same time constraints. This job is also amazing for me because it’s easy to put down and walk away from allowing me to have a much needed work life balance. If I had ended up in research, I don’t know if I would ever have left the lab. The hyper fixation would have taken over often. And working on the bench in the clinical lab was hard for that balance because shift work which included weekends and evenings made planning social things very difficult.

Is my current job my dream job? I don’t know. It’s a great job and I don’t want another. I used to think I wanted to work from home full time but after doing that a little bit due to some extenuating circumstances, I don’t. I need to get out every so often. Being in the office is hard though, it’s noisy and distracting. It feels more constrained than being at home. I think i just need to change environments now and again and I have a plan for that.

I think at this point in life my dream job is to reach a point where I don’t need a job but work one because I enjoy it and only do it when I feel like it. And that is probably a dream that is a long way off if it ever comes true.