I Was Never Looking for a Niche

For years, I carried a quiet tension that I couldn’t quite name.

If someone asked me what I did, I would hesitate.

Not because I didn’t know.

Because I didn’t know where to begin.

Was I a consultant?

Yes.

A university instructor?

Also yes.

A writer.

A facilitator.

A project manager.

An AI strategist.

A community builder.

Someone deeply interested in philosophy, psychology, systems thinking, mythology, and what it means to consciously create a life.

Every answer was true.

Every answer was incomplete.

So I did what many of us do.

I edited myself.

I’d choose the version that seemed most appropriate for the conversation I was in.

Sometimes I was the consultant.

Sometimes the educator.

Sometimes the writer.

Rarely all of them.

The world rewards clarity, after all.

Or at least that’s what we’re told.

“Find your niche.”

“Become known for one thing.”

“People need to know exactly what you do.”

It isn’t bad advice.

For many people, it’s exactly the right advice.

But every time I tried to follow it, something in me quietly grieved.

Because every choice felt like leaving another part of myself outside the room.

For a long time, I wondered if this was simply the price of being understood.

Then, one afternoon, in a conversation much like so many others, something unexpected happened.

We weren’t trying to solve my marketing.

We weren’t trying to reposition my business.

We were simply trying to answer a question.

“How do I explain all of this?”

And then, almost casually, a metaphor appeared.

A house.

Not a brand.

Not an ecosystem.

A home.

Suddenly everything became obvious.

I wasn’t trying to sell a collection of unrelated things.

I had spent the better part of thirty years building a home.

Some rooms were devoted to creating our lives.

Others to creating better work.

Others to creating a more humane world.

The books belonged.

The consulting belonged.

The university teaching belonged.

The technology belonged.

The writing belonged.

The conversations belonged.

None of them needed to compete with one another.

They simply lived in different rooms.

Then something even more beautiful revealed itself.

The rooms weren’t random.

Every room was simply another way of exploring the same question.

How do we consciously create lives that reflect who we truly are?

For the first time in decades, I felt something I hadn’t realized I was longing for.

I felt seen.

Not because other people suddenly understood me.

Because I finally had a language that told the truth.

A few days ago, a friend shared a reel on Facebook.

She joked that explaining what she does to strangers is “a full contact sport.”

I laughed.

Then I recognized something underneath the humour.

The exhaustion of trying to explain a life that refuses to fit neatly inside a single sentence.

I replied:

“Keep doing what you’re doing, love. It has taken me nearly a decade to finally be able to communicate to the world all that I have to offer. I have built a home with many rooms, and all the rooms are different ways of answering the same question.”

After I wrote those words, I sat quietly for a moment.

Because I realized I wasn’t only writing to her.

I was writing to every version of myself that had spent years trying to become more understandable by becoming smaller.

The older I get, the more I wonder if we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Perhaps the question isn’t,

“What’s your niche?”

Perhaps it’s,

“What is the question your life keeps returning to?”

When I look back over my own life, I don’t see someone who couldn’t make up her mind.

I see someone who has spent thirty years returning to the same inquiry.

Sometimes through project management.

Sometimes through leadership.

Sometimes through organizational change.

Sometimes through philosophy.

Sometimes through writing.

Sometimes through conversations.

Sometimes through technology.

The expressions changed.

The question remained.

That is what gave my life coherence.

Not the discipline of doing one thing.

The discipline of returning, again and again, to what mattered most.

I wonder how many people are quietly carrying this same tension.

The artist who also teaches.

The engineer who writes poetry.

The physician who paints.

The entrepreneur who studies mythology.

The parent who is also a researcher, a gardener, and a musician.

Perhaps they aren’t scattered.

Perhaps no one has ever given them permission to honour the fullness of who they are.

We have become remarkably good at organizing people into categories.

Less so at helping people discover the forms through which they can most truthfully express themselves.

For me, that form became a home with many rooms.

It took me decades to find it.

Not because I wasn’t creative enough.

Because I hadn’t yet found the form that could hold the fullness of what I was trying to express.

But this isn’t really a story about finding a house.

It’s a story about finding a language that allows you to be seen without becoming smaller.

For someone else, that language might be a garden.

A river.

A body of work.

A school.

A practice.

A business.

A piece of music.

A way of serving.

It doesn’t matter.

The form is not the point.

The freedom is.

Today, when someone asks me what I do, I smile.

I tell them I’ve built a home with many rooms.

It’s no longer an explanation.

It’s simply the truest way I know to describe my life’s work.

But I don’t hope you build a house like mine.

I hope you discover whatever form allows the truth of your own life to be expressed.

Something that doesn’t ask you to leave pieces of yourself at the door.

Something spacious enough to hold your questions, your gifts, your contradictions, and your becoming.

Because I no longer believe the goal is to fit ourselves into the categories the world has already created.

Perhaps the art of living is creating forms that are honest enough to reveal who we are.

Not performing versions of ourselves that are easier to explain.

But patiently creating lives, work, relationships, art, businesses, communities, or practices that allow the whole of us to be seen.

Not all at once.

Not by everyone.

But truthfully.

The world doesn’t need more people who have found the perfect niche.

It needs more people who have found the courage to express the fullness of their humanity in whatever form is uniquely theirs.

It took me decades to discover mine.

If you’re still searching for yours, keep going.

Not because you’re trying to become someone else.

But because somewhere along the way, you may discover the form that finally lets you say,

“There I am.”