I am a writer. I am a musician. I am a song maker. I am a creator of digital tools and a curator of faith-rooted objects and a person who makes hats and a cat mom and a believer and a side hustler and a person who feels the world very deeply and has learned, slowly, to do something with that feeling rather than just carry it.
I am many things. I have always been many things. And for a long time, I experienced this as a problem.
The Pressure to Be One Thing
The world has a strong preference for people who are one thing. It is easier to understand a person who is a musician, full stop. It is easier to market, to categorize, to introduce at a party. "This is Emy, she's a musician" is a clean sentence. "This is Emy, she's a writer and a musician and she makes custom songs and she also creates AI design tools and she has a spiritual wellness community and she writes books and she makes hats" is a sentence that requires the other person to do more work.
I spent years trying to simplify myself for other people's convenience. I tried being just a musician. I tried being just a writer. I tried picking the one thing and committing to it and letting the other things fall away.
It never worked. Not because I lacked discipline, but because the other things were not extras. They were essential. Each one was a different facet of the same underlying thing — the need to make, to express, to connect, to offer something of value to the people around me. Cutting off any one of them was like cutting off a limb. The body kept trying to grow it back.
What the Research Says About Multipotentiality
There is a word for people who have many genuine interests and abilities: multipotentialites. The researcher and author Emilie Wapnick has written extensively about this, and her work has been a source of significant relief to people who have spent their lives being told they need to focus.
Multipotentialites, Wapnick argues, are not people who haven't found their one true calling. They are people whose calling is the intersection of many things — whose greatest contributions come precisely from the ability to move between domains, to bring the perspective of one field to the problems of another, to synthesize and connect in ways that specialists cannot.
The world needs specialists. It also needs people who can see across disciplines, who can translate between communities, who can bring the tools of music to the problems of healing, or the sensibility of writing to the structure of a digital product. These are not lesser contributions. They are different ones, and in many cases, more rare.
What I Have Found in the Many Colors
When I stopped trying to be one thing and allowed myself to be many, something unexpected happened. The things I made got better. Not because I was doing more, but because each domain was feeding the others.
The writing made the music more precise. The music made the writing more emotional. The spiritual practice gave both of them a container and a purpose. The digital tools gave me a way to serve people who needed something practical. The faith objects gave me a way to serve people who needed something beautiful. The custom songs gave me a way to serve people who needed something made specifically for them.
None of these things competes with the others. They are all expressions of the same underlying impulse: to pay attention to what people need and to make something that meets them there.
An Invitation to the Multi-Colored
If you are someone who has been told — by others or by yourself — that you need to pick one thing, I want to offer you a different frame.
Your many interests are not a sign of scattered attention or lack of commitment. They are a sign of a particular kind of intelligence — one that sees connections, that finds meaning in synthesis, that is genuinely alive to more than one domain of human experience.
The question is not which one to choose. The question is how to find the thread that runs through all of them — the underlying purpose that each one is serving in its own way. When you find that thread, the many colors stop feeling like a problem and start feeling like a palette.
You are not too much. You are exactly enough. All of you.
Emy J is a writer, musician, song maker, and creator based in Ottawa, Ontario. She makes things for the soul who wears many colors. Visit emyj888.com to explore her whole creative world.