Something in me refuses to settle for average
the urge to do it all: from untriggered sapien journal
People have been giving me the same advice for years.
Pick one thing.
Go deep. Build authority. Stay in your lane. The algorithm rewards consistency. The audience wants to know what to expect. Choose a niche and commit to it.
I have received this advice from mentors, marketing professionals, well-meaning friends who have watched me move between disciplines with what they describe as restlessness and I would describe as a life.
My counter, every time, is the same.
I can sing. I write psychological suspense that keeps people up at night. I compose. I research and speak publicly and make people laugh and then sit them down in the next sentence with something that quietly wrecks them. I write about spirituality with the precision of someone who earned the understanding the hard way, and about love and relationships with the specific authority of someone whose experiences were genuinely, magnificently messed up.
Why would I amputate most of that to fit into a box someone else designed?
My favorite person in history never had a niche.
Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and designed flying machines and mapped the human nervous system and composed music and wrote poetry and studied geology and hydraulics and botany.
When people asked what he was, the answer was simply: everything he was curious about.
That is the only answer I have ever found satisfying.
Untriggered Sapien runs on cold brew and the recognition that the hunger certain people feel is not a symptom to be managed. It is the most accurate signal their nervous system ever sends.
There is something deeply specific about the kind of wanting I am describing.
Not ambition in the generic sense. Not the hunger for money or recognition or the particular satisfaction of making people who underestimated you regret it.
Something older and less rational than any of those things.
The feeling that you are brushing against the full shape of your life without fully inhabiting it.
That you contain more than the current container allows.
That settling, even into something genuinely good, would require a subtraction from yourself that you are not willing to make.
I want to name what this actually is.
Because most people who feel it have been told it is a problem.
It is not a problem.
Some people learn survival before they learn themselves.
This is not a metaphor. It is a developmental sequence with specific consequences.
The child who grows up in a house where emotional weather changes without warning becomes an expert reader of rooms. They learn to calibrate themselves to what the environment requires before they have ever had the chance to discover what they actually are when nothing is required.
They become what the room needs.
And they become very good at it.
Good enough that people call it a gift. Emotional intelligence. Empathy. Maturity beyond their years.
Nobody tells them that half of it was survival wearing the costume of a personality.
My father left when I was seven. What followed were years of reading atmospheres, managing emotions that were not mine to manage, becoming fluent in everyone else before I had language for myself.
And something else happened in those years that I did not understand until much later.
The hunger arrived.
Not as ambition. As compensation.
If the world inside was unstable, something in me reached outward and upward and in every direction simultaneously, looking for things that could not be taken away.
Skills. Knowledge. The specific sovereignty of being able to do things.
To write a story that makes someone feel understood. To compose something that exists nowhere else. To understand a concept deeply enough to explain it in a way that makes it feel obvious to someone who had never seen it before.
These were not things anyone could leave behind when they walked out the door.
They were mine.
And the hunger for more of them was not greed.
It was the most intelligent response available to a child who understood, wordlessly and early, that the only things you can truly keep are the ones that live inside you.
Here is what the niche advice misunderstands.
It assumes that breadth is a failure of focus.
That the person who moves between disciplines is scattered, unable to commit, running from depth by accumulating breadth.
Sometimes that is true.
But sometimes the person moving between disciplines is doing exactly what their nature requires.
The Vedic tradition has a concept for this. Vibhuti. Divine manifestation of multiple gifts in one person. Not a sign of confusion. A sign of a specific kind of instrument — one that was not built to play a single note.
Modern psychology has a term too. Multipotentiality. The research is consistent: people with strong abilities across multiple domains do not produce average work in each domain. They produce synthesis that specialists cannot. The insight that arrives when a pattern from one field lands inside another. The story that works because the writer also understands psychology. The spiritual teaching that lands because the teacher also understands science. The song that breaks something open because the composer also writes.
Leonardo’s notebooks were not the output of someone who could not decide what to be.
They were the output of someone who understood that reality does not organize itself into disciplines.
Only institutions do that.
I have tried to settle.
Not once. Several times. With genuine effort and good intentions.
Each time the same thing happened.
I became quiet in a way that felt wrong.
Not peaceful quiet. The quiet of a room where someone is absent.
I was performing the life rather than living it. Going through the motions of the focused person, the consistent person, the person who had chosen a lane and committed to it.
And every time I sat down to write or sing or compose or research or speak, the thing that arrived was smaller than what I knew I was capable of.
Because it was arriving from a reduced version of myself.
The full version — the one with all its contradictions and range and the specific messed-up experiences that produced genuine understanding rather than borrowed wisdom — does not fit in a niche.
That version requires the whole space.
Here is what I have come to understand about the hunger.
It is not restlessness.
It is not the inability to be satisfied.
It is not a wound looking for a distraction or an ego looking for an audience.
It is accurate perception.
The hunger is the instrument recognizing it has not yet been fully played.
And the advice to narrow it, to pick one note and play only that, comes from people who are either instruments of a different kind or people who have confused the frame with the painting.
The frame is useful.
The frame is not the point.
Da Vinci was considered difficult by his patrons.
He took too long. He moved between projects. He left things unfinished when his attention was pulled somewhere more urgent.
The patrons wanted deliverables.
Da Vinci was building a mind.
The Vitruvian Man is not a drawing.
It is what happens when a painter decides to understand anatomy.
The flying machine is not an engineering document.
It is what happens when an engineer decides to understand birds.
The synthesis is the gift.
The synthesis requires the breadth.
The breadth requires the hunger.
So no.
I will not pick a niche.
I will write psychological suspense that wrecks you on a Monday and spiritual wisdom that quietly restructures something on a Wednesday and dark romantic realism on a Friday that makes you laugh and then sit very still.
I will sing the things I cannot say in prose and compose the things that singing cannot hold and research the things that composition points toward and speak the things that writing holds too privately to release.
I will move between disciplines the way a river moves, not because it cannot commit to a direction but because the direction was always toward the sea and the path there is never straight.
The hunger is not my problem.
The hunger is my compass.
Here is what I want to say to the version of you that picked up this piece because something in the title recognized you.
The people who told you to want less were people for whom less was enough.
They were not wrong for themselves.
They were wrong for you.
The version of you that could genuinely settle, that could arrive somewhere and rest inside it without slowly disappearing from it, that version would not have read this far.
You read this far because you know the hunger I am describing.
You have tried to quiet it and found yourself quieted in the process.
You have performed contentment so many times you can feel the gap between performing it and actually feeling it.
You know, underneath everything, that the full life and the safe life are not always the same life.
Here is the truth nobody says plainly enough:
The hunger is not the obstacle between you and the life you want.
The hunger is the life you want, already present, already moving, already refusing to let you mistake survival for living.
Everything you were told to reduce about yourself was actually the most important thing about you.
The range. The contradictions. The inability to be contained by a single category.
The restlessness that everyone around you found exhausting and that you, privately, have always suspected was the most alive thing inside you.
It was.
It is.
Something in you refused to settle for average.
That refusal was never the problem.
That refusal was always the answer.
The only question worth asking now is whether you are finally ready to stop apologizing for it.
Here is exactly what your paid subscription unlocks:
The Vedic concept that names what the multipotential person actually is — not a diagnosis but a designation — and why the ancient tradition considered this type of instrument a specific responsibility rather than a personal indulgence.
Why the niche advice works for some people and quietly destroys others — and the one question that tells you in sixty seconds which category you are in.
The synthesis formula: the precise way multiple disciplines create insights that no single discipline can access, with examples from the three pieces on this publication that could only have been written by someone who refused to pick one thing.
The specific cost of trying to settle — named precisely, from the inside — and what it produced that the narrower version could never have.
The final section. Written directly to the part of you that is still half-convinced the world is right and you should be smaller. The one that has been listening to the wrong advice for too long.
The refusal was always the right answer.
This is where you find out WHY.