I have this insane idea that if I could just herd all the ideas in my head, throw them all in a field somewhere, pick one out of the lot and focus on it for the rest of my life, say, writing novels exclusively, then I’d be happy.
I’d have a very writerly routine—get up in the morning, take my son to school, write, write write, have lunch with other writer friends, write write write, spend time with the family until late in the evening, and put my son to bed. After all of which I’d sit by the fire with my husband, ignore him, and read books.
Because that’s what “real writers” do, right? The ones whose routines we read about in the books and blogs?
This would be a completely impractical way to live, of course, not to mention that it would come at the expense of all the other things I find fun and interesting. As it turns out, I’m a person with varied interests. “Multi-passionate,” the current trend is to call it. I call it “being human.” As in, no person was ever born with only thing that interested them. Sure, some things might appeal to you more than others, but even if you’re a devoted musician or a practicing artist, you’ll likely find that there are things that hold your attention that you might enjoy and want to spend time on.
“Who am I?” is one of the most difficult questions I can ever ask myself, because finding the one true answer to it can often feel very limiting to a person like me, who identifies as different things at different times.
I’m a journalist, yes, and I love that, but I’m also a novelist, and I love that, too. So I’m a writer, then? Well, yes. But I’m also an entrepreneur because the idea of building businesses is really exciting to me. I love radio; the medium has always spoken to me, even though I haven’t yet explored it fully. I was a photographer for a while—I had a photograph published on the National Geographic website a few years ago and I was commissioned many times to do photography for magazine stories. And I love traveling.
“Who am I?” then is the completely wrong question to ask. Sort of like asking a seven-year-old, “What would you like to be when you grow up?” a question I was asked frequently by relatives and friends of my parents. It is a question to which, even today, I’m not sure I have an answer.
What happens when I try to answer that question is that I try, mentally, to take everything I love doing and fit it into a box. What I’m doing essentially, is taking the three-dimensional me and making it two-dimensional and not only is that limiting, but it cuts off parts of myself, it makes me feel like I’m at a loss more than I feel like I’m gaining something.
“I envy people who have a singular focus,” I said to an author friend the other day. “I feel that I have lost out because of my attention span. That if I had just picked something, stuck with it with a laser sharp focus and not explored all these other things, I’d be excellent at one thing rather than being mediocre at many different disciplines.”
His eyebrows sort of meshed together in that weird look that people get before they tell you that you’re a complete loony.
“What on earth are you going on about?” he said. “If you picked one thing, you’d be bored out of your bloody mind!”
This, I think we can all agree, is right on the mark.
“What you have to do is treat all your various interests as a blessing, not a curse,” he said. “Think of it as progressive excellence towards a number of different things and that as you work on each, you’re reaching excellence in all of them because of what you’re learning through all the other disciplines. This kind of binary thinking—either I’m excellent at one thing or mediocre at several—is bogus and simply not true.”
I latched on to that conversation and have been using it as a way to create a model of reaching excellence in my life.
Rather than defining myself as a writer or a journalist or a blogger or a novelist, I’ve started focusing, instead, on the skills I want to learn and the things I want to create. That, for me, has been a much more productive and sane way of measuring achievement and satisfaction with work.
It doesn’t matter “who” I am right now. All that matters is that I’m writing this newsletter editorial. It doesn’t matter “who” I will be when I finish; all that will matter is that I will be working on a piece of fiction.
This new way of seeing things has made me push in directions that I have wanted to explore but that didn’t necessarily fit in with my original idea of “novelist who never leaves the house.” Podcasting, for instance, which fits nowhere in my “brand” but that is something I’m increasingly excited by and interested in exploring.
I’m a writer and I love writing, so I must do it routinely and with dedication. That much is fixed. Everything else is negotiable.
And when I see it that way, the need to define what I do, how I do it, and fit it into neat categories dissipates entirely.
Are you struggling with who you are meant to be?
Can you consider letting go of the idea altogether?