I AM NOT A NICHE. AND NEITHER ARE YOU.

The beginning thought for this piece came to me this morning somewhere between the shower and working three different anti-frizz products into my curly hair, which feels like exactly the right origin story for something about refusing to be one simple, manageable thing.

I have spent a significant portion of my life trying to find my "one thing," and I want to say that without any embarrassment or shame, because I think a lot of people know exactly what I mean when I say it. I think in part because of this relentless "find your purpose" messaging we get from the self help industry, the idea that there is one thing we're each supposed to be doing, and if you haven't found it yet, something has gone wrong with you. I'm not sure I believe that's how it works, but that's a topic I'll save for another time. The search for the one thing is real and it is relentless, and it is also, at least for some of us, a search that never quite gets us to where we hoped it would.

Analyst, Mediator, Small Business Owner, Psychotherapist, Interior Designer, Lifestyle Blogger, Reiki Practitioner, Artist. And that's the short list.

Each time I leaned into one of those, I genuinely believed I had found it. This is the thing. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. And for some period of time it did feel that way. There was a kind of relief in it, the relief of having an answer when someone asked, of having a lane, of feeling like I was finally pointed in the right direction, heading somewhere. Something neat and tidy for when people ask that dreaded question, now, what do you do? But underneath that relief, something else always started to happen. Something that didn't quite fit, like wearing a coat that was almost the right size but not quite, and you keep altering it hoping it will eventually feel right and it just doesn't. And my discomfort, more often than not, got turned inward. What is wrong with me? Why can't I just pick something and be satisfied? I've sat with enough people in a therapy room to know that this is one of the most common and quietly painful ways we wound ourselves, by pathologizing our own complexity instead of getting curious about it.

We live in a culture that wants us reducible. Niche down, we're told. Get clear, pick your lane. I had a social media marketer tell me once that when you start out, you have to have a niche, and when you get a bigger following, you can show more of you. And I understand where that comes from. Clarity really does make things more transmissible in a noisy world. A single, legible identity is easier to follow, easier to sell, easier to build around. The market likes simplicity, categorization and neat little boxes. The algorithm loves it too. It doesn't know what to do with complexity though. And honestly, neither do we. And so, slowly and often without even realizing it, we start to flatten ourselves to fit. We tuck the other parts away into a drawer, the parts that don't fit the bio or the brand or the particular version of ourselves we've decided to lead with, and we get to work becoming something the world can more easily digest and consume. Compartmentalizing our authentic selves, which is its own kind of irony in a time when everyone is being told to just be more authentic. I've gotten to where I'm not even sure what that word means anymore.

But here's what that flattening costs, and I want to say this as someone who has spent years thinking about how the psyche works. The parts of ourselves we suppress don't just quietly disappear. In my experience, both personally and sitting with people in a therapy room, they find somewhere to go and they wait, sometimes for a very long time. They aren’t particularly patient about it either, like a throbbing tooth you keep probing with your tongue or that low grade fever you convince yourself isn't really there. For me it felt like I kept showing up to my own life in costume or maybe not in a full costume. Like I was pressing different parts of myself against a window from the inside, watching, waiting, wondering when it would be their turn. Like I was only ever showing up as a fraction of who I actually am and the rest of me was just standing there, patient and persistent, waiting for permission to exist, to be seen. Some of those hidden parts also had a way of becoming a little rebellious.

Aerial Thoughts, 2023

I want to say something before I go any further, because I mean it and I don't want it to get lost. I genuinely admire the masters, and if I'm being completely honest, have at times envied them. The people who are incessantly, almost helplessly obsessed with a single thing, a craft, a question, a discipline they keep returning to for their whole lives. There is something extraordinary about that kind of depth and devotion.

But I've also noticed something in myself when I look too long at what's been placed inside someone else. I stop seeing what's been placed inside me. It's a kind of blindness, that grass is greener thing, where you become a tourist in your own life and forget to look at what's actually in front of you. The thing is, that obsession, that singular focus some people carry their whole lives, I don't think they chose it any more than they chose the color of their big brown eyes. I think it's something they were just born with, some particular shape they arrived with, and they can't help returning to it any more than water can help running downhill. You can't borrow someone else's shape and expect it to feel like yours. After decades of searching, here's where I've arrived, I am not that shape. And maybe you're not either.

I am a mediator and a psychotherapist and an artist and an interior designer, someone who notices the way light falls in a room and immediately starts thinking about how to arrange it differently, and also has sat with people in a therapy room tracking the invisible architecture of how they relate to one another, and also comes home and paints. Some people find that confusing. I used to find it confusing too. But if I shut any one of those off, I'm not fully flowing. It's like a faucet turned down to a trickle instead of all the way up. These aren't separate interests competing for my attention. They are all just me, and honestly, I'm still figuring out what to call that. It may be the same for you too.

There's a version of that old saying most people know, but they rarely hear the whole thing. Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one. The second half almost always gets dropped because it complicates the cleaner narrative. But that dropped half is where a lot of us actually live. And I think we've gotten confused about value. The specialist and the generalist both bring something real, something the other can't quite replicate, and if you've ever been on a good team you probably already know that. You want both. The generalist sees across things, makes the unexpected connections, holds the complexity that the specialist sometimes can't see from inside their depth. The market doesn't always reward that equally, but I'm honestly not sure the market is the right measure. That might just be our perception. And I think it probably is.

I'm learning how to make my peace with being less legible to the market, which is a genteel way of saying that trying to make a living doing a lot of different things simultaneously doesn't always work. Feeling fully expressed in a capitalistic economy is its own particular challenge, and I won't pretend otherwise. But what I've not been willing to make peace with is being less legible to myself. And maybe that's enough of a north star for me right now. I also know that having the luxury to even ask these questions and be self indulgent in this way is not something everyone has.

So if you're someone who is still searching for your one thing, still waiting to feel like you've finally arrived at the version of yourself that is focused enough, specialized enough, clear enough, I want to offer you something. What if the search itself is the wrong question? What if you're not failing to find your one thing, but being called toward something harder and less tidy, something that the branders and the marketers don't quite have a template for? Full expression is inconvenient that way.

xx,

Michel