The Constellation Within: Why Gifted Women Are Not Meant to Choose Just One Thing

A love letter to every woman who has ever been told she's "too much"

The Seventeen-Year-Old Who Knew Better

When I was seventeen, my college application essay was called “Multiplicity of One.”" Even then, I saw straight through the lie the world tells gifted women: You have to choose one thing to develop in yourself and then your potential is beyond your wildest dreams.

I didn't believe it. I couldn't. I was already very much living otherwise.

I also had the tongue in cheek math humor there. Multiplicity of one means you can find where a single factor will cross the x-axis in a graphed polynomial equation. I do like to cross a line metaphorically and challenge someone to follow me. Even if it’s some poor beleaguered admissions rep. (For a time in college, I became an admissions assistant, which was a hoot.)

I wrote about how a human being can contain multitudes—writer, leader, artist, scientist, activist, athlete—not as contradictions, but as a constellation of selves. I owe much of that clarity to my brilliant first mentor, Barbara. She was the first to reflect back to me that being "too much" was, in fact, my greatest gift. She taught me to bless and celebrate and protect my multiplicity instead of apologizing for it.

I also wrote it under intense pressure the night before I had to overnight the application to make the deadline, because I’d needed to change my college plans late in the game. My first plan, the one I’d secured in mid-August of my senior year, wasn’t going to work for relationship reasons I won’t spell out here. It seems so silly and trust me, the story that came after that is anything but silly.

I wrote “Multiplicity of One” as a lyric poem in iambic pentameter. It got me in to the University of Michigan and at the last minute no less, and that’s what it was for. It sold me as the kind of student who was prepared to design my own major at the creative-and-talented-friendly Residential College. I ended up transferring into a degree program that already existed (and graduating a year and a half early) so it’s not like anything really went to plan there.

Except the essay: I’ve referred to it in my mind countless times over the last 30 years. That seventeen-year-old intuition has proven itself over three decades and counting.

The Archetype of Multiplicity

Here's what I've learned since then: The world doesn't make it easy to hold onto that truth. It wants specializing and ideal matches to job skills and key words. It wants women to raise or support families as though they don’t also work full time, and work full time as though they don’t have a family to take care of. It wants us to feel drained and scarce a lot of the time. We have to fight that slog pressure—every single day.

And another brilliant mentor (a multipotentialite) came into my life midstream to teach me that “potential” is pragmatically balanced against the “performance pie.” Hard truth, brilliance of the gifted sort does not bring you every ingredient necessary for extraordinary success. We also have to be savvy enough to seek out the parts we didn’t come with on our own. We have to take social risks and get support and collaborate and be willing to suck at things that are new to us. However, sometimes finding a home on a team gets complicated because we are more than one widget. Someone I worked with recently called me a “Swiss Army woman,” and I laughed because it’s not untrue. But as I reflect in my forthcoming book, it’s not easy to be a team player when by virtue of talent or flexibility or necessity you end up always playing more than one role on the team. It’s still challenging for me today. It looks much easier to be a simple star, a single role, a clearly defined creature.

Gifted women are not meant to be simple or single stars, on our own or otherwise. We are constellations. Sometimes we reconfigure which constellation we resemble, sometimes quickly and other times a slow evolution over time. We shift, we adapt, we radiate in directions that make no sense to linear systems.

Over and over, we've been told: Pick one. Pick one career. Pick one identity. Pick one face to present to the world. Develop that personal brand.As if narrowing ourselves down will make us easier to manage. As if the multitudes are a flaw.

The Cost of the Lie

I think about my good friend Star—brilliant, fierce, over seventy years old and still a force of nature. She came to me carrying decades of this conditioning and heaping guilt. "I feel scattered," she said. "Like I've lived ten different lives and never mastered any of them."

She spoke of her multiplicity like it was a character defect. A Boomer-generation woman who had absorbed the message that successful people have clear, linear paths. That expertise means specialization. That being good at many things—or having taken some detours, started over, or at some point taken a break to regroup—somehow diminishes your worth. (And even I, decades younger, grew up hearing those messages.)

But when she listed her "scattered" accomplishments—the businesses built, the lives she touched, the healing journey and the creative works that poured from her in different seasons—I saw something else entirely. I saw a woman who had been brave enough to follow her curiosity wherever it led. Who had refused to shrink herself to fit into neat categories or stick with things that didn’t fulfill her as she once expected. Who reinvented a new pursuit or three at ages where people are starting to wind down and shrink themselves. She still marches to the beats of her favorite bands and, although she is in a recent season of life that compelled some physical shifts, she is choosing to do it her way. With an incredible spirit.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s not for everyone. Most of my favorite people aren’t.

And an aside—I can tell when someone is going to be one of my favorite people when even their negative feedback pixellates into multiple directions. When people dislike them for a whole cluster of divergent reasons, never the same one.

What surprised me is that all this time, Star thought her multiplicity was chaos. Failure. Noncommittal. Dilution. I saw it as courage. She’s the kind of person I like to spend time with, because she’s interesting. She’s always had something to observe about life that wasn’t quite the angle I would get anywhere else.

The Truth About Integration

This is the work so many of us face, especially as we mature: not the integration the world demands (pick one thing and stick with it), but true integration. The kind that honors every facet of who we've been and who we're becoming.

Integration doesn't mean reduction. It doesn't mean cutting away until only one story arc or aligned archetype remains.

Integration means gathering all the facets—wisdom, grace, strength, fragility, creativity, discernment—into a whole we can love. It means blessing our own constellation as complete. It might be a very different bouquet of flowers than the one you thought you would arrange, but every bloom and every green shoot that represents your lived experience is there on purpose.

Integration means looking back at the seeming zigzags and non sequiturs of our lives and recognizing them as the sacred spiral they actually were. Each turn, each new interest, each pivot—proof of a mind too vast to be contained by convention.

Sometimes it seems the world finds reinvention pathological. But is it? I argue it’s just growth and openness to experience.

The Seasons of Synthesis

There comes a time in every gifted woman's life when the question shifts. Not "What should I choose?" but "How do I weave it all together?"

This is particularly poignant for women in their later decades, who may look back and wonder if their multifaceted journey was somehow "wrong." Who may feel pressure to create a single, cohesive legacy from what feels like a lifetime of beautiful contradictions.

But what if the legacy is the multiplicity? What if the gift you've been giving the world all along is the permission to be complex? To be a walking example that brilliance doesn't have to be contained?

I have myself and several friends and clients from 45 to 85 learning this now. As for Star, she's beginning to see her varied path not as evidence of inability to commit, but as proof of a soul too rich to be contained by any single expression. Her legacy isn't one thing—it's the demonstration that a woman can be many things, and masterfully. She is likely to be remembered as whole different people by the people who were close to her in each of her divergent phases. If she wanted a funeral (which she decidedly does not) it would be a whole story unto itself.

The Design, Not the Flaw

If you've ever felt fractured, like your multitudes were proof of being broken, I want you to hear this: You were designed this way.

You are not a bug in the system. You are a feature.

The world needs women who can hold paradox. Who can be both gentle and fierce, both grounded and visionary, both practical and mystical. Who can speak multiple languages — not just verbal ones, but the languages of different industries, different communities, different ways of being.

Your multiplicity is not a flaw to be fixed. It's intelligence expressing itself in its fullest form.

What if we told a different story about gifted women? What if instead of asking us to choose, the world celebrated our range? What if instead of seeing our varied interests as lack of focus, they were recognized as evidence of minds too expansive for narrow lanes?

What if we raised girls to see their multitudes not as confusion, or dilution, but as completeness?

What if we honored the women who refuse to be reduced, who insist on bringing their full selves to everything they touch? To bringing more than one facet of themselves to actualization in this life? At a time, or sequentially over time.

The world needs your multitudes. All of them.

We are not meant to dim our brightness to make others comfortable. We are not meant to fragment ourselves to fit into systems too small for our vision. We are meant to shine in all our directions at once, to be the proof that a human being can contain diversity and adaptation as one.

To every woman reading this who has ever apologized for being too much: stop. You are exactly enough — in all your multiplicities, in all your seasons, in all your glorious, irreducible complexity. You are a constellation, not a single star. And constellations light the way for others to navigate by.

Ready to embrace your own multiplicity? The first step is recognizing it as the gift it has always been.