Life as a Multi-Potentialite and Human Design Projector

Imagine this: you don’t know what to do at any given time of the day and yet you want to do everything at the same time. You want so much, you’re not sure there is another human being on earth who could possibly imagine the depths of your covetous mind. When you do decide to focus your limited energy on one thing for a while it takes flight, it soars high above you, and then you send it into the world knowing you may never think about it again. Your mind has already moved on and your body is screaming for rest. If you actually let yourself lay down you do so knowing you will be trapped in your head imagining endless scenarios for the lives you can’t have, incapable of closing your eyes. Of taking a breath. Of saying you’ve done enough. Of imagining a world that’s simple.

Welcome to my life as a multi-passionate projector. If you don’t know what that means, that’s okay. I talk a lot about various self-discovery practices on this channel. Through the process of examining my inner workings over the years through the application of different practices and paradigms, I’ve figured out a lot of stuff that Jenny from 5 years ago had no idea about. So if you’re just starting or maybe just getting interested in some of this stuff, you’re in the right place. Some of the realizations I’ve made over the last few years have literally changed the way I understand myself and how I operate in the world. It’s given me a new language with which to interpret my life and everything in it.

So, shocking revelation #1 was that there is a word for people who easily and eagerly collect many varied interests and skills along with this real talent and natural inclination to make connections between things at a really high level, and because of this they don’t think like a lot of society and aren’t as great at working in highly specialized careers, but can thrive in more generalized roles that allow them to pull from their enormous toolbox of talents and experience to creatively problem solve or develop better systems for society. Well, when I said A word that was a bit misleading, there are quite a few, actually. Multi-potentialite, multi-passionate, multi-hyphenate, polyglot, puttypeep. Whatever the terminology, that’s me. To a T. You see, I could never explain to people throughout my life why I knew I would never have just one career. Why I wasn’t like most of them but I couldn’t really articulate why. They wouldn’t understand the frustration I felt every day in trying to mold myself into someone who fit the model of what we as a society have decided adults should be like as productive working folk who contribute to the workforce and figure their lives and careers out just once, then live on autopilot for the next 50 years. How it physically hurt me to imagine that life for myself, while the oppressive weight of failure seemed permanently affixed to my shoulders as I pivoted from job to job, trying to find a path that could eventually lead me to some semblance of happiness or fulfillment.

Not realizing the entire time, that that’s now what I was made for. It wasn’t how my brain worked. It wasn’t what I needed, and it wasn’t where I was needed. One of the biggest a-ha moments I’ve ever had was coming to the realization that I was a multi-potentialite, and a creative, and not likely to ever be fulfilled in a 9-5 environment. And because of the unique way I have lived and the experiences I’ve had, and the way I collect hobbies and interests and new perspectives, the way I see the world, always from up here - way up in the clouds, seeing the magical interconnectedness of the systems we’ve built up around ourselves and the beauty and heartbreak of the world on such a large scale, that my unique genius and the individual way my mind works has a purpose and a value just as rich and essential to society as any other person. It gave me permission to stop comparing myself to anyone else, to escape from the prison the word “should” had built up around me, to stop bearing the guilt of not conforming to other people’s standards of success, and start asking myself what success means to me. Me alone. What does it look like for me to love my life and find excitement and fulfillment and yes, financial security too, in what I do?

It has also taught me to be more compassionate with myself. It’s not easy, it’s a constant struggle of feeling like I’m not good enough at any one thing to truly call myself an expert, to feel behind, to know other people probably see me out here on my 4th career and think it means there must be some inherent flaw in me. Trying to explain to people why I can’t just have one job. Why a simple life just isn’t on the table for me. Why I continue to do so many things that I feel overextended and constantly paralyzed by indecision and overwhelm almost every moment of every day, yet when it works, when I’m doing things that give me that hum of alignment and YES that I feel like I am doing this exactly right. That I don’t regret any of it. That I want to do even more, still.

That’s what it’s like for me, still trying to figure out how to be who I am in this world. How to thrive as a multi-potentialite instead of burning out. The eternal struggle. That’s where human design comes in. As I mentioned earlier, I am a projector, and this is one of the energy types that humans fall into in the human design system. It’s not the rarest, but still makes up only about 20% of the population. Human design is a fairly new interpretation of several ancient systems, combining astrology with the i-ching and the chakra system to come to a new understanding of our unique energy body and the way we are meant to function in the world.

I stumbled upon human design, and as someone who has always been fascinated by ancient knowledge and more modern efforts to understand and classify people based on patterns in our behavior and psychology, I instantly became obsessed. I got my human design chart, which is similar to astrology in that it’s based on your exact time and location of birth, and on that first day of just reviewing what my energy type was, what kind of authority I had, and the basics of just those two things - I felt so validated, everything was resonating so much so that I was like - this cannot actually be a thing that’s so easy for people to access. It’s like having cheat codes for every aspect of your life.

So here’s what understanding your human design can do for you. Through studying your design you can unearth the secret strategy to how you do things, how you get what you want, how you make decisions, how you relate with other people and how they experience you, your actual purpose and gifts, the things you need to feel secure and successful. What it looks like when you are acting in alignment with how you are built and what it looks like when you are not. Tendencies you will have throughout your life, and the patterns you might encounter repeatedly as you are trying to figure yourself out. I know it sounds wild that you can get so much information about yourself from this crazy sounding system that’s using words and numbers and stuff that you don’t understand and seem straight up insane. Believe me, I get it. This is not some paragraph you can read in the paper to see what your day is going to be like, this is a complex system that needs time to sink in once you start exploring it. There are things that I’ve read that I did not understand for months until suddenly it just clicked. Human design may be especially difficult for you to grasp if you don’t necessarily see yourself that clearly. If you’ve got a lot of preconceived notions about the woowoo self-help world that may be keeping you closed minded about what truths may be found there, especially if they’re inconvenient truths, depending on the kind of life you’ve had and the extent to which you have bought into the lie that we are all supposed to be the same. All supposed to want the same things or be able to function the same way every day to get to the same goal.

You’ll have to leave all of that behind if you actually want to give self-discovery a real chance. There are ways of understanding yourself better and learning how to function in a way that feels better to you. At least, that’s what I have found. When it comes to being a projector, this was shocking revelation #2 - I do not have consistent access to energy. Can you imagine going your whole life, into your late 30’s, feeling broken and sick because every day is a roller coaster that you ride not knowing if you’ll be able to do everything you want to do and eventually always having to accept that you just can’t without breaking yourself to do it, ending every day feeling like you’ve failed. You’ve not been productive enough. You should be able to hustle. You have ambitions, right? You need to hustle to make them happen. You see the army of young people online making content about productivity and waking up at 5AM and earning $20,000 a month because they’ve hacked their life and manifested success and you just… want to disappear. You shut down. You hide. You can’t figure out how to do it and you don’t have the energy to do it and you don’t know how you’ll ever succeed and you push and push but you go absolutely nowhere.

This was what life as an unaware projector was like for me. Learning about how projectors are different from the majority of people on earth, who are generators and function completely differently, was life changing for me. I read about how easily we drain, how we don’t really create our own energy, how we are not meant to push or hustle or force things to happen in our lives, how our job is to learn things and prepare to share them with the world, to help people grow, but only when they see us and recognize what we have to offer and invite us to share it with them. How so many projectors feel like black sheep. How we face so much rejection and invalidation in life because we don’t realize we have to wait for people to be ready for us before we give of ourselves to them. It was like letting out a breath I’d been holding my entire life to learn that.

Now, I try to live by my human design strategy. That is, I understand better how to take the things I’m passionate about and knowledgeable about, and yes even the things I do for my real life jobs, and create a space for them to exist that allows people to find them and decide for themselves if they want to invite more of it into their life. This strategy has brought so much more ease into my life, as a person and a professional, it has brought me job offers, successes I would probably not have experienced had I gone about trying to make them happen through more traditional means, more thoughtful ways of interacting with people, and it has given me permission to remove some of the expectations I had always placed on myself for productivity and success and adopt a more realistic and healthy picture of what those things mean for me. In that vision, I allow myself to rest. As I said in the beginning, rest of not easy for me, but learning to prioritize it benefits every aspect of my life in numerous ways that I’m just starting to see and understand.

There is so much more that I could go into regarding both of these subjects. And I mean, there is so much more to explore when it comes to how learning about these systems can really change your life, but for now I hope this has been helpful to you - regardless of whether you identify as a multi-potentialite or multi-passionate person, whether you are a projector or not, I wanted to share specifics about my life and how those things have affected me, but I think the lessons are applicable to anyone. If you are interested in learning more about this stuff leave me a comment and like this video. And, if you are like me, and my words resonated with you at all, say hi. It’s been a lonely road feeling so adrift in the sea of people around me, it’s always nice to be reminded that there are people out there who maybe, even if just a little bit, get me.

Thanks for reading, I recorded this message for YouTube as well. You can watch the full video below.