The Day I Realized ‘Multipassionate’ Wasn’t a Character Flaw

(…and other things I wish someone had told me before I bought a filing cabinet for my personality.)

I spent a generous portion of my life believing something was fundamentally off about me—not dramatically wrong, just… excessive. Too curious. Too scattershot. Too excited about something brand-new at precisely the moment everyone else thought I should double down on whatever I’d just started.

I assumed this was a personal defect, possibly inherited, possibly karmic. You know how some people are born with dimples or a charming sense of direction? I seemed to have been blessed with a brain that collected interests the way some people collect stray cats: impulsively, enthusiastically, and with absolutely no foresight about where they’d all sleep.

If you’ve lived this life, you know the drill. You fall in love—hard—with photography. You build a tiny shrine to your new camera lens. You watch documentaries about Henri Cartier-Bresson and start wondering if maybe you could become the Forrest Gump of artistic careers. Then—hello, hello—painting strolls in, batting its eyelashes like it owns the place. Meanwhile, writing is in the corner clearing its throat because you swore 2023 was its “comeback tour.”

And you? You’re standing in the middle of the circus, apologizing for the elephants you didn’t invite but desperately want to keep.

For decades, I tried to tame this. I labeled it. I therapized it. I bought planners—plural. I even read books that insisted I needed a color-coded filing cabinet for all my disparate “selves.” (If you felt a sudden breeze, that was the collective sigh of my entire soul exiting my body.) Another book advised me to create a Master Plan, because apparently I was going to “focus.” The implication was always the same:

If you don’t pick one thing, you’ll never be taken seriously.

Which, translated into human, meant:

You, Angie, are doing your life wrong.

And for the longest time, I believed it.

Then came the moment—the big, transformative, cosmic-bonk-on-the-head moment—when I realized the joke was not on me, it was on the expectations I’d been trying to contort myself into.

It wasn’t a thunderclap. There were no angelic choirs, no glowing neon sign that said “Congratulations, You’re Free Now.” It came slowly, like a sunrise you don’t register until your whole kitchen is full of golden light.

It started the day I noticed that the things I loved—writing, art, photography, creativity, psychology, teaching, storytelling, painting, building weird online projects at 2 a.m.—weren’t random. They were constellations. They were puzzle pieces that made no sense in isolation but snapped together with that satisfying click when I finally stopped treating them like misbehaving children and started treating them like… me.

The multipassionate brain wasn’t a problem. It was a design feature.

And here’s the real kicker: the moment I stopped assuming I had to choose, I started creating things I never could have forced myself into. Books that needed both my writer brain and my photographer eye. Projects that fused art, neurodivergence, humor, and a deep devotion to the unusually wired. Businesses built on creativity and chaos and compassion. Worlds inside worlds.

The day I realized “multipassionate” wasn’t a character flaw was the same day I realized I’d been underestimating myself for decades.

I wasn’t too much.

I was too compressed.

Once I quit flattening myself into other people’s expectations, the whole weird, vibrant, joyful, unmanageable masterpiece of me snapped into place.

And maybe—if you’ve read this far—some part of you knows exactly what I mean. Maybe you’ve got the same jangly internal music, the same itch to learn twelve things before breakfast, the same tendency to start three new hobbies just because the lighting was good.

If so, here’s the truth I needed someone to tell me much earlier:

Your curiosity is not a liability. Your delight is not a distraction.
You are not scattered—you’re profoundly creative.

And honestly? The world needs more of us.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just remembered a project I forgot I was excited about.