By my late teens, I knew exactly what I wanted to be.
I had touched computers. I had made a Wang machine play music. I had taught grown adults to do mail merge. The evidence was in, and the verdict was clear: I was going to build software for a living.
And I do not mean modestly. In my head, I was a Bill Gates kind of person. I would build software that ran organisations. Possibly governments. The scale of the ambition was not the problem.
But that is not how it went.
For reasons that made sense at the time, a degree in the software field did not work out for me. I will spare you the details, because the details are not the point. The point is the feeling: I wanted something with my whole heart, I could see it so clearly, and the door did not open.
It was my first real disappointment. Not the small kind. The kind where a future you had already been living in quietly gets dismantled, and you have to walk out of it and find somewhere else to stand.
I landed on a Bachelor of Commerce.
And here is where the story refuses to be a sad one. I did my best at that degree. I made good friends, including keeping Barbara and Elizabeth close. I enjoyed the experience. It turns out you can grieve one door while genuinely enjoying the room you walked into instead.
But the software dream did not die. It just went underground.
After university, I took short courses in tech. Certification after certification. I taught myself skills nobody assigned me, the same way eight-year-old me taught herself to knit. The interest never left. It simply waited for the world to build roles that could hold it.
And the world did. Product management. Innovation. Roles that did not exist in anyone’s imagination when I was choosing degrees, roles that need exactly what I turned out to have: business training fused with an incurable itch to build things. The commerce degree and the technology obsession ended up braided together into a career I could not have designed on purpose.
I am still building. Always. If I have to use low-code and no-code tools, I use them. My most recent build is Nia.africa, constructed by a woman with a commerce degree and forty years of refusing to stop.
And now, in this new age of AI, here is the plot twist I did not see coming: my lack of formal training in coding no longer disables me at all. The machines meet me halfway. The dream I set down at eighteen is more available to me at almost-fifty than it has ever been.
The lesson I take from this one is gentle, because the story earned a gentle ending.
A dream that does not work out is not always a dead one. Sometimes it is a seed that waits. Mine waited through a commerce degree, a stack of certifications, and several decades, and then the world changed shape, and there it was. Still alive.
If you are carrying a dream that did not work out the way you pictured it: hold on to it loosely, but hold on. You do not know what roles, tools, or entire industries are coming that might hand it back to you.
Everything turned out alright in the end.
Come back tomorrow for Day 41: the girl who renamed herself.
Sign the guestbook
Leave me a birthday note, tell me which post was your favourite, or share your own way to shine. I read every one.
