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 disappear. They go underground, and they wait. Sometimes, when they've been waiting long enough, they find other ways to make themselves known, through restlessness, through unexplained boredom, through a low hum of dissatisfaction that's hard to name, through what I'd describe as a kind of internal friction, like an engine running slightly out of alignment. For me it felt like shrinking and hiding. Like I was pressing different parts of myself against a window from the inside, waiting to be let back in. 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 particular kind of blindness, that grass-is-greener gaze, the one that makes you a tourist in your own life, always looking at someone else's terrain and wondering if you should have been living there instead. The thing is, that obsession, that singular focus that some people carry, it isn't just a personality trait or a lifestyle choice. I think it's a genuine gifting. It's part of how they're wired, their particular shape. And it works precisely because it is their shape. You can't borrow someone else's shape and expect it to feel like yours. After decades of searching, what I have found to be true is simply this, 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. It's a unique combination some people don't understand. Highly analytical on one hand, able to track the details of a person's story with precision, and on the other hand someone who thinks in color and feeling and in the invisible architecture of how people relate to one another. I am highly sensitive and intuitive, drawn to the emotional undercurrents, the things that live beneath the surface of what people say and do, and equally drawn to the way a physical space can support someone or quietly fail to. What I've come to understand is that these aren't separate interests competing for my attention. They are different expressions of the same underlying orientation, a deep curiosity about the inner life and how it shapes everything around it. These are not phases I passed through on my way to becoming something more focused. They are all of me, simultaneously, and they have always been informing and deepening each other in ways I'm still discovering. I believe that is the journey.

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 I think that dropped half is where a lot of us actually live, and it deserves to be said out loud. Breadth is its own kind of mastery. It just looks different, less like depth in a single direction and more like an ability to hold complexity, see unrelated patterns, make unexpected connections and see across domains in ways that specialists sometimes can't. It's just less legible to the market, and the market has a way of making us feel like its preferences are objective truths.

I'm learning how to make my peace with being less legible to the market. What I've not been willing to make peace with is being less legible to myself. And maybe, in my own small and simultaneously significant and insignificant way, I can still make my mark without having to reduce myself to do it. Maybe I can contribute something to the way we think about what a life can look like, not by having the clearest single answer, but by refusing to pretend the question was ever that simple. Maybe the most original thing I can offer is exactly this, a different way of looking at what it means to be gifted, to be called, to be fully alive in the particular shape you were given.

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