I have spent an exhaustive amount of my creative life trying to become a different kind of writer. Don’t get me wrong, I like the way I write and trust my voice, at least most days. I guess I mean I’ve spent years trying to become the kind of person who writes differently. The person with the routine. The person who wakes up at the same time every morning, makes coffee, sits down at the same desk, and writes for the same two hours before my kiddo gets a chance to interrupt me. The person who chooses one project and sees it through before becoming distracted by another idea.
I have tried. My God, I have tried so many times, and occasionally, I can even pull it off for a while. I’ll make the schedule and decide that this time I am going to become someone different, someone disciplined. I’ll buy a notebook, because apparently no personal transformation can begin without buying a new notebook, and for a few days I will feel so freaking proud of this new and different version of myself. Then, like clockwork, something else catches my attention. A new idea arrives while I’m supposed to be working on another project. I become completely obsessed with it and follow it down some random rabbit hole (we will talk about those a lot here, haha). Then, the project I was doing yesterday suddenly feels dead.
Eventually, I find myself in the same familiar place, looking at all of these starts and stops and wonder why the hell I can’t simply stick with something. Cue, my family’s voice: “Why can’t you just commit to something, Megan? Why can’t you stay with one thing?”
For a long time, I thought this shifting as a character flaw and I wore those voices in my head as as an identity– unfocused, undisciplined, totally inconsistent, but then I found Human Design, and PTL, I felt validated for the first time in a long time.
The problem with someone else’s rhythm
One of the things that caught my attention when I started learning Human Design was the idea that we don’t all move through the world with the same creative rhythm.
This seems super obvious as I write it now. Of course we don’t, and yet so much creative advice assumes that there is a correct way to make things, and if we can just figure out that magical routine, then we can finally get ourselves to behave accordingly like the “creative golden child” we’re suppose to be. No, thank you. I am here to break all the creative rules. What about you?
Thankfully, Human Design gave me a different question. What if the way I was already creating wasn’t the problem?
After all, I’m a Manifesting Generator. When I first learned the language used around Manifesting Generators, I laughed at how eerily familiar it was to my creative life: nonlinear, fast-moving, interested in multiple things at once, prone to skipping steps, changing directions, abandoning what no longer feels alive, etc.
Basically, here was an entire system describing the things I had spent years trying to exorcise out of myself.
That doesn’t mean I saw “Manifesting Generator” on my chart and decided I never had to finish anything again. Instead, it gave me the permission to become curious about the pattern I repeated instead of immediately judging it. Maybe I wasn’t failing at consistency, maybe consistency wasn’t the thing I actually needed in the first place.
I started paying attention to my life
I began to notice that when I am genuinely interested in something, I have an enormous amount of energy for it. I can disappear inside a project and make connections that didn’t seem connected five minutes earlier like some genius on a Rubik’s Cube, but only when I am jazzed for for it. But when the energy is gone (AKA, the passion), then so is the focus.
This is the part I used to fight. I would keep sitting with the same thing I’d committed to because I had decided this was the project. I would try to manufacture the feeling I had yesterday and make myself continue because surely serious writers don’t wander away every time something shiny appears in their peripheral vision.
The thing is though, forcing myself rarely brought the energy back. If anything, it made me hit burn out and hating the project I once loved. But, sometimes if I stepped back from the thing and gave myself breathing room by reading something else, making something else, living my life by doing something completely different, then, strangely, I would find myself circling back to the original thing but this time with new energy and fresh perspective.
Creative life isn’t a straight line, it is more like a spiral.
And I had spent years standing inside the spiral wondering why I couldn’t walk straight.
Let me me be clear though, this isn’t permission to never do anything difficult. I think this is where conversations about “following your energy” can get a little slippery. There are plenty of things I don’t feel like doing that still need to be done, parts of writing that are boring, drafts that become difficult because I’ve reached a part that ask me to stay and wrestle with the tender thing.
I guess that’s part of the whole experiment of creating, learning, and unbecoming who we thought we should be. And maybe that’s what I’m most interested in exploring here, using Human Design as a way to interrupt some of the assumptions we’ve made about ourselves.
A little experiment
Think about the way you actually make things, not the way you wish you did.
When have you felt most absorbed in your work? What tends to happen right before you lose interest?Do you create steadily, or in seasons? Do you need one project in front of you, or five? Do you come alive with structure or immediately begin trying to escape it? Do ideas arrive because you went looking for them, or because something on Substack caught your attention and wouldn’t let go?
And maybe the most important question to sit with:
What part of your creative rhythm have you been treating like a problem?
Don’t try and fix it, just notice. Let me know what you uncover.
P.S. If you know your Human Design Type, tell me in the comments, along with the creative habit you have spent the most time trying to change about yourself. If you don’t know, you can grab your free chart here.
