There is a piece of business advice that has followed me through nearly every chapter of my life.
“You need to niche down.”
Pick one thing. Become known for one thing. Don’t spread yourself too thin.
Every time I hear it, I understand exactly why people give the advice. From a marketing perspective, it makes sense. The world likes things that are easy to categorize. We like specialists. We like neat little boxes. They make people easier to understand and easier to sell.
And yet, every single time I’ve tried to force myself into one of those boxes, it has felt like I was betraying something deeply fundamental about the way my mind works.
A Brain That Cannot Stop Learning
From a very young age, I have been drawn toward learning. Not casually interested. Completely captivated. I have always wanted to understand how things work, how they’re built, how they’re created, and whether I could teach myself to do them too.
Over the course of my life, that has resulted in what many people would probably describe as an absurd collection of hobbies and skills. I taught myself piano. I have sung opera, musical theater, jazz, punk, and alternative music. I sewed an authentic six-layer Rococo gown with virtually no previous sewing experience. I made a hyper-realistic cake that looked like a pot of pasta. I’ve restored furniture. I’ve taught myself graphic design, film editing, web design, and coding. I modeled professionally and worked as a fit model for multiple brands. And, of course, I eventually became a therapist.
Even writing that paragraph makes me uncomfortable. I can feel the urge to soften it. To qualify it. To make a joke so it doesn’t sound like I’m taking myself too seriously.
I think many women know exactly what I’m talking about. We’re often taught that confidence is acceptable, but exceptionalism is dangerous. We learn to shrink our accomplishments just enough to keep other people comfortable. We become experts at highlighting our weaknesses while quietly minimizing the things that come naturally to us.
What Happens When You Try to Become Smaller
For a long time, I interpreted this part of myself as something I needed to fix. When I was studying opera back in 2008, one of my instructors warned me not to become “a jack of all trades and a master of none.” I believed him.
So I tried. I tried to become only an opera singer. I tucked away my love for belting musical theater. I stopped talking about writing alternative music. I downplayed my interest in jazz and the other styles that fascinated me just as much. I told myself that if I wanted to become excellent, I needed to become smaller.
Looking back, I don’t think the advice was malicious. I just don’t think it was meant for a brain like mine.
The advice to become smaller was not malicious. It just wasn’t meant for a brain like mine.
When Neurodivergence Explains Everything
As I’ve come to better understand my own neurodivergence, and my likely experience as someone who is twice-exceptional, so much of my life has begun to make sense. My brain is deeply driven by curiosity. It seeks complexity. It lights up when there’s something new to understand. But what has been equally important for me to recognize is that my relationship with novelty isn’t about collecting unfinished hobbies.
When something captures my interest, I don’t simply dabble. I immerse myself.
Throughout my life, people have reflected something back to me that has always been difficult to receive. They have noticed that when I decide to learn something, I often execute it at a surprisingly high level. Even writing those words makes me cringe a little. They bump up against years of conditioning that tells me admitting my strengths is somehow arrogant.
But I’m beginning to realize that acknowledging how my brain works is not the same thing as believing I’m better than anyone else. It is simply telling the truth.
Some people are gifted athletes. Some people have extraordinary memories. Some people hear music in ways I never will. And some of us seem to have brains that rapidly recognize patterns, imitate complexity, and develop competence across multiple disciplines. That isn’t a moral achievement. It’s neurological diversity.
How This Shows Up in My Work as a Therapist
What I’ve noticed is that this same pattern has followed me into my work as a therapist. People often ask me what my niche is. The honest answer is that I don’t experience my work as separate niches.
Yes, I specialize in trauma. And attachment. And neurodivergence. And couples. And dissociation. And family systems. And non-monogamy. And sex therapy. From the outside, those can look like unrelated specialties. Inside my mind, they are one conversation.
I cannot understand attachment without understanding neurodivergence. I cannot understand neurodivergence without understanding trauma. I cannot understand trauma without understanding family systems. I cannot understand couples without understanding sexuality, shame, developmental history, and the nervous system.
My brain doesn’t organize knowledge into boxes. It organizes it into relationships.
For years, I worried that this meant I lacked focus. Now I wonder if what I actually lacked was permission to trust integration over specialization.
I also think this is why so many of my neurodivergent and twice-exceptional clients seem to exhale when they walk into my office. They get it. They know what it feels like to be told, over and over again, that the answer is to become less of yourself. To choose one interest. One identity. One career path. One way of existing that makes other people more comfortable. They know the exhaustion of constantly translating a multidimensional mind into something that fits on a business card.
My brain doesn’t organize knowledge into boxes. It organizes it into relationships.
What If the Goal Is Coherence, Not Smallness?
What if the goal isn’t to become smaller? What if the goal is to become more coherent? Those are very different things.
As I look back over my own life, I no longer see someone who couldn’t settle on one thing. I see someone following the same thread through dozens of different expressions. Whether I was singing, sewing, designing, restoring furniture, baking, building websites, or sitting with clients in the therapy room, I was doing the same thing.
I was studying complexity. I was looking for patterns. I was trying to understand how beautifully intricate systems work.
Perhaps that’s always been my niche. Not a single topic. A way of thinking.
Finally Letting Myself Appreciate the Gifts
For a long time, I’ve spoken openly about the costs of being twice-exceptional. The loneliness. The masking. The social misunderstandings. The asynchronous development. The accumulated wounds that come from spending a lifetime feeling fundamentally out of step with the world around you. Those costs are real, and they deserve to be acknowledged.
But lately I’ve found myself asking a different question. What if I also allowed myself to appreciate what this brain has given me? What if I stopped apologizing for the breadth of my curiosity? What if I stopped trying to make myself more marketable by becoming less myself?
I’m finally reaching a place where I feel ready to embrace the gifts alongside the grief. Not because being twice-exceptional has been easy. It hasn’t. But because after spending so much of my life trying to fit into other people’s definitions of expertise, I’m beginning to trust my own.
Maybe my work was never meant to fit neatly inside one box.
Maybe neither was I.
