A few years ago I started reading books about multipotentiality. Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose and Emilie Wapnick’s How To Be Everything were the two that cracked things open for me.

What they gave me was something I didn’t even know I needed: permission. Permission to go down rabbit holes. Permission to follow a new interest without having to explain myself. Permission to be the kind of person who starts a miniatures phase in the fall, a coding project in the winter, and a short film in the spring. That’s just how I work, and for a long time I felt like I had to apologize for it. Reading those books, I stopped apologizing.

One of the most helpful things I ever did was find a community of multipotentialites who just get it. The Puttyverse, Emilie Wapnick’s online community for multipotentialites, is where I met people who didn’t need me to explain myself. I could say “I’m switching gears again” and nobody rolled their eyes. They nodded. That’s so refreshing. And it’s a great place to ask questions about how other multipotentialites organize their lives.

I’ve made many friends on the Puttyverse. Four years ago I found an accountability buddy there. We’re still friends today. That relationship has been quietly sustaining in ways I didn’t expect.

Multipotentialites often end up going it alone because they are not getting any support. I’d encourage you to look for your people. They exist. And being around them changes something.

Around the same time I joined the Puttyverse, I started learning about my INFP personality type through Personality Hacker. I have always keyed out as INFP whenever I took a Myers-Briggs personality survey. A lot of multipotentialites do (along with INFJ and ENFP). It was one of those strange experiences where you read a description of yourself and feel a little exposed. Like someone had been watching.

The core of the INFP type, as Personality Hacker describes it, is authenticity. We’re driven by a strong internal value system, and we like to explore the world, ideas, people, and possibilities. That fit me perfectly. I’ve always needed my work to mean something, and I’ve always needed to keep moving toward whatever lights up next. Understanding that helped me see my restlessness not as a flaw but as a feature. My curiosity isn’t lack of discipline, it’s how my mind is actually built. It was a real relief to read those Personality Hacker articles on INFP.

There is something not in the INFP type that I’ve had to be honest with myself about. I get overstimulated. Easily.

Today’s world is not designed for people like me. Social media in particular is built to grab attention and never let go. For a multipotentialite brain that’s already prone to chasing the next shiny thing, it can be a disaster.

I’ve had to work at substituting screen time with creative time. Reading. Drawing. Making things. Being in the studio. These feel different in the body. They fill me up instead of draining me out. I don’t always succeed at this. But I try, and trying matters.

Overstimulation goes hand in hand with a lack of focus. To help with that, I use Role Play. When I step into my studio to do a project, I first decide what role I’m playing at that moment. Is my role the studio assistant, who organizes the studio and keeps it clean? Am I the art director who makes the plans and gets all the tools and materials lined up and ready (like how a sous-chef does mise-en-place)? Am I lead artist, ready to sit down and dive into the project? Deciding ahead of time which role is needed most at the moment keeps me focused on the task. If the studio needs to be cleaned a prepped, I stay on that task and resist diving into the project. It feels so much better to have the clarity of purpose ahead of time.

Over time I developed a practice I call Meditative Ideation. It sounds fancier than it is. Basically, I take advantage of what neuroscientists call the Default Mode Network, the part of the brain that activates when you stop focusing hard on something and just let your mind wander. When I’m not actively trying to solve a problem, that’s often when the best ideas show up. In the shower. On a walk. Right before sleep.

So I built that into my routine. I take real breaks. I meditate. I let my mind go blank for a while. And I keep a notebook nearby for when something floats up.

Journaling is another big one for me. I think of it as spring cleaning for the mind. Getting thoughts out of my head and onto the page clears space. It also shows me what I actually care about, because the things I keep writing about are the things that really matter.

I used to have a complicated relationship with planning. I’d make a plan, not stick to it, and then feel bad about myself. That cycle wasn’t working.

What I eventually figured out is that plans are not contracts. They’re pointers. Directional aids. A plan tells me roughly where I’m headed, not exactly how I’ll get there.

Now I keep a running weekly list of creative things I want to do. At the start of each day I jot down a few directions, loose goals, intentions. Not a to-do list. Because to-do lists have a way of becoming “didn’t get done” lists, and I’ve spent enough time criticizing myself for not finishing things.

So my lists are suggestions I make to myself. I follow them when they still make sense, and I let them go when they don’t.

Speaking of which, I start a lot of projects and don’t finish them. I want to say that clearly, without shame.

Here’s what I learned from Barbara Sher: whatever I did starting a project served a purpose. Maybe I learned something. Maybe it fed a curiosity that needed feeding. Maybe it was just nourishment for the brain, and that’s enough.

To help myself celebrate instead of criticize, I keep a Completion Diary. In it I write down every creative thing I do. The definition of completion I use is loose on purpose: I define it as having done something toward a goal, whether or not I reached the finish line. When I page through that diary, I’m always surprised. Wow. I do a lot of stuff. That feeling is real, and it keeps me going.

If anything I said above sounds familiar, I want you to hear this: you are not broken.

Your brain works this way for a reason. The curiosity, the pivoting, the starting and stopping, it’s all part of how you engage with the world. That’s not a defect to fix. It’s a way of being that has real value.

The work is learning to work with yourself instead of against yourself. And that’s lifelong work. But you don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to keep apologizing for who you are. My co-host Annie Slade and I talk about all of these issues and more in our podcast Wandering Weirdly. You can find it wherever you podcast and you can also watch us on YouTube.