I didn't have a dream job when I was a kid. Maybe astronaut because I liked Star Wars so much and I knew NASA was a thing. Probably the first job I actually wanted was to be a doctor because my grandfather was a doctor and he was probably the biggest influence on me when I was old enough to start thinking seriously about such things. I had an uncle who was a doctor and I knew some doctors' kids and they all seemed to have more and nicer shit than we did and they got to do more fun stuff than we did. My grandfather once told me, about money, "Money can't buy you happiness, but it's harder to be happy if you're poor." I took that to heart. One of my best friends had decided early on that he was going to medical school, largely for the same reasons I wanted to go. So that was my initial direction. Little did I know that college was going to be a lot harder than high school and it was nearly impossible to work 30-35 hours per week to make enough money for tuition and living expenses and make straight A's, which is pretty much what it took to get into med school. My grades after my first semester at UT pretty much cast the die. I wasn't going to medical school. After that, I had no direction whatsoever. I was pretty devastated that, for the first time in my life, I wasn't going to get to do what I wanted to do. That, and losing the girl who I thought was the girl of my dreams during that same first semester, was a double blow that took me out. Maybe I'm an overly sensitive pussy, but it took me a while to recover from those things.
I picked a major at UT that I thought would at least allow me to get a degree. Something that I was interested in and that didn't involve physics or organic chemistry. So I got a degree in anthropology. It took me a while to finish it, for a lot of reasons. I thought it would be a non-event. The funny thing is that when I finally got that fucking piece of paper I felt pretty good about it. Right around that same time something happened at work that caused me to have to use the court system. My boss told me to go to small claims court to sue a customer who hadn't paid their bill. I walked it through, awkwardly, but I eventually got the constable to seize this guy's property and the very next day he showed up and paid his bill in full. That was my first taste of the law and how it worked. I was absolutely hooked. I immediately looked into whether my GPA was good enough to get into any law school. It was, barely, if I did well enough on the LSAT. I studied my ass off and got into a decent law school. I treated law school like my second chance. I worked really fucking hard. I wasn't top 10%, but my grades were good and I even excelled in the advocacy program (mock trial). Turns out, I was a natural. Looking back, I should have known, given my skill set and what makes me tick.
There are days when I absolutely love being a lawyer. There are days when I absolutely hate it. I've never seriously thought about walking away from it though. I know for certain that this is the best use of my natural talents I could have possibly found. There might be other jobs where I would be happier, but I don't think there's anything out there that would give me the combination of things the law has given me.
So, I don't have any regrets about where I ended up career-wise, for sure. I just wish I had found it sooner and that the journey had been less painful.