For most of my life, I carried the guilt of starting too many things and finishing too few. Every time I switched gears, the inner critic showed up. “Was I wasting time? Am I just being flaky?”

I didn’t have the words for it back then. I just had a gut feeling that choosing one thing meant betraying the rest.

That changed in 2020. My coach introduced me to the word multipotentiality. It flipped everything. I wasn’t failing to focus. I was just wired to have a bunch of interests, and that was totally normal.

Suddenly, my joy for programming supported my art. Kinetic sculptures that I built clicked thanks to Arduinos. Storytelling shaped how I approached design. Even my passion for fishing collided with a study of Victorian acclimatization societies and found its way into my art.

Once I accepted that multipotentiality is how my mind works, the self-criticism ceased. Starting new projects and not necessarily finishing them became enough. Each new project, no matter how short-lived, was nourishment for my mind. If I feel alignment and joy in the moment, I know I’m on the right track. That’s it. It’s not complicated.

A few months ago, I built a weird little building for my model railroad, a parallelogram squeezed into a tricky spot. I inkjet-printed ghost signs, I made a SketchUp 3D printed front, and I added working lights inside. I pulled it together from years of random skills. Design, electronics, architecture, miniatures. All of it mattered and all of it informed the project.

A friend with ADHD once told me our brains are alike… scattered for sure, but wired for connection. I probably have a mild undiagnosed form of it. It doesn’t matter. I don’t feel the need for medication or anything like that. But that conversation and the one with my coach helped me stop pathologizing myself and start honoring what I am.

I don’t know if I’ve inspired anyone yet. But I hope so, which is why I’m writing this blog post. I hope that I inspire you. Because the moment you stop trying to narrow your multipotential mind to one lane, the world gets a lot wider and you become a lot happier.