The Pressure to Become a Singular Thing
Do you ever feel pressure to define yourself?
To choose.
To specialize.
To niche down.
To become one clear, marketable identity.
And increasingly, to monetize it?
I’ve been guilty in the past of thinking every interest must become a brand, every hobby must become productive, every gift must become available to the masses And I know I’m not alone in this feeling…
It feels like all of us must answer: what exactly do you do?…what are you known for?
But women are not linear creatures. We are layered and creative. Sometimes contradictory — always curious.
We are somehow interested in beauty and philosophy, business and nature, order and freedom, design and movement, home and adventure, softness and ambition.
But western culture lovvvvvves a trademark, be it registered or via reputation. Because clear categories are easier to market, easier to explain and easier to optimize. So we quietly edit ourselves into more digestible versions — not because it feels true, but because marketability is rewarded publicly.
Over time though, a strange grief will develop from feeling unable to fully express the breadth of yourself. I know from experience. Especially for creative women; women whose minds naturally connect ideas; women who become restless inside rigid jobs; women who are not meant to spend their entire lives performing one role. But follow your inklings and risk being seen as flaky. At least that’s how it’s felt for me in the past.
What I’ve realized is that the pressure to “figure it out” often has less to do with purpose and more to do with our modern obsession with certainty. In our age social media, the internet, groupthink, etc., we are rewarded for being known for a thing. Because data loves a stable narrative, a predictable trajectory, a fixed identity we can rely on. But real life is rarely that tidy… And in real life (aka not online or tv), I think we all prefer to be around people who are real, not produced and predictable. Right? I hope so…
At least from my perspective, many of the most fulfilled women I know are not the ones who perfectly identified one singular path early on. They are the ones who remained responsive to themselves as they evolved; they are the ones who allowed interests to change and identities to shift.
I think there is such intelligence in dynamism.
In fact, maybe being a jill of all trades (and beyond) is not the problem. Maybe suppression is. Perhaps the exhaustion many modern women feel comes not from doing too much, but from doing too little.
Maybe the discomfort we feel sometimes comes from compressing ourselves into roles that are too narrow for the paths we wish we had freedom to explore.
There are women who spend decades believing they must choose between their many selves. But we are not machines built for singular output. We are adaptive. We are seasonal. We are creative and fluid.
To this end, maybe maturity is not finally becoming one thing. Maybe it’s learning how to belong to yourself more wholly, full of many things at once.
x, S
