Multipotentialite

Today I learned that I am a multipotentialite. If - like me until an hour ago - you have no idea what this means, I would highly recommend watching Emilie Wapnick's TED Talk on it (here). Suddenly my mind makes so much more sense! Turns out I am not a lone weirdo, there's more of us and we are so awesome!

My whole life I was criticised for my inability to follow through on my hobbies, for being too obsessed with my interests, only to flutter to a new one like a butterfly going from flower to flower. I have always devoted myself to things wholeheartedly, but nothing was forever, and everything was always all or nothing. A quick walk around my house and you'll find the yoga gear I stopped using a few months after I got started, books I bought a decade ago and haven't gotten around to reading and countless crafts projects abandoned halfway. I fully intend to return to all these things, my attention simply got pulled elsewhere. And there's no middle ground with me.

I was told I was fickle, that I didn't truly love anything, because if I did surely I would stick with them. I was shown time and again that to succeed and be happy you needed to devote yourself to your choices, and that constantly changing your mind was irresponsible and immature. You can't build a career this way, you can't pay a mortgage and that you couldn't have this sort of behaviour if you wanted to raise a family. That if you are constantly starting over you will never excel at anything and you will always be average (like that is an insult).

For most of my life people have tried to change my ways, as if it was a matter of choice. As if by trying really hard I could be normal and I could stick to only a handful of interests. Or they tried to have me be less into *insert current obsession*. Because apparently normal people don't wake up one day with a desire to read about the Vietnam war or spend a month memorising the first two acts of La Traviata. And by Jove, I needed to stop talking about Alexander Hamilton!

No one ever asked me about how life is through my brain. Why I am the way I am. (Not sure that last sentence has an answer, but at the very least no one asked me the thinking behind my behaviour.) Here is a few secrets: normalcy is boring. Life is too short to only be one thing. The more you stick to the same things, the smaller your comfort zone becomes and the less you are able to adapt to new challenges. Normative doesn't breed out-of-the-box thinkers. In fact, normalcy kills innovation. You need us to take you to new places. And we need you to be our north star so that we don't stray too far (at least I do). Because left to my own devices I would gladly trade sleep for one more episode or chapter, only to suffer the brutal consequences the next day (because my body is not eighteen anymore).

In true fashion, I am now obsessed about exploring what it means to be a multipotentialite (how meta is that?), so I will probably carry on writing about the challenges and rewards, as well as my ground rules for not let it take over my life completely. Or not. Maybe I'll become obsessed with something else before I ever get to write those posts. Because that's who I am, and it's plain awesome.