Growing up, we often get asked what we want to be when we grow up, and our answer at that moment is often entirely different from what we aspire to be in actuality years down the road. You may have known you wanted to be a teacher, a biologist, or an engineer as soon as you knew what each occupation entailed. But if you're anything like me, you've told many different people many different things regarding what you want to be when you grow up.
You may be someone who has so many interests that it fills up your brain and overwhelms you when the thought arises to make a decision to focus or specialize in one area. You may be in love with math and how easy it comes to you, but you might also be in love with reading literature, writing anything and everything, analyzing the economy, and helping others. When you get to the point in your life where you're forced to make a decision and you're someone that has a multitude of interests like I mentioned above, things can get pretty complicated. You can begin to feel like you don't belong anywhere and that you will never succeed in one area since success to you has always been cultivated from multiple fields.
It can be difficult to accept yourself for who you really are and what you really love when everyone around you is dead set on a limited career or lifestyle for their future. It causes anxiety because you begin to feel the pressure of time withering away while you are still trying to make a decision that will make you happy and compliment all of your interests in the long run.
It is hard to identify yourself with a certain group when your passions are abundant and your decisions are horribly limited. You cannot relate wholly to the teachers, artists, mathematicians, and scientists because your mind is prioritizing aspects of each of those fields. It can make you feel out of the loop or possibly even make you feel like you don't know enough to identify yourself with one of the groups. It is hard to make and keep friends because you usually end up lending yourself to being a floater, also known as a friend who has friends amongst different groups yet doesn't belong to a particular one and, as a result, often gets pushed to the side or left out.
Picking a college major becomes your biggest nightmare. You cannot imagine living a life that does not contain math. You have to write to stay sane. You need economics and science to challenge you and inform you. You need teaching to feel the reward of helping others and find joy in seeing people you care about succeed. You simply don't have the time, money, or capacity to major across seven different fields. You need photography for an outlet. As time keeps ticking and money keeps spending, you feel the pressure to make a decision on just one of these things. No matter which field you pick, you feel the pain of betraying all of the other possibilities and abandoning the idea of pursuing any of those things ever again.
In an inspiring Ted Talk by Emilie Wapnick, the term "multipotentialite" is used to categorize these kind of people that are conflicted because they have so many interests and are raised in a culture where "having a destiny" or being a specialist is idealized in society, contrary to how the "Renaissance man" was put on a pedestal back in the day. She further explains how easy it is to feel alone and useless when you have many passions. Towards the end, she insists that being a multipotentialite is not a bad thing like we perceive it to be because of the culture we live in, and it is instead an identity that has its own unique superpowers: idea synthesis, rapid learning, and adaptability.
The struggle of being a multipotentialite is not that you are one, it's that you did not know you were one. Being a multipotentialite is not an identity that is disadvantageous compared to the specialists of the world and is instead an open door to innovation and creativity that would cease to exist if we were forced to make one decision.
Don't let the force of making a decision limit you and your passions. If you ever are forced to make a decision on just one of your many interests, find ways to integrate your other pursuits into your daily life so that you will never stop challenging yourself, bringing yourself joy, and breeding new ideas and creativity for the world to see.
