Discount DaVinci

I Contain Multitudes, and I'm Trying to Stop Beating Myself Up About It

I watch those people from afar: those Michelangelos, those masters of their trade, passionately hurling their 10,000 hours toward one singular subject until I have no choice but to be in awe of their skill. They chip away at their passion and ascend, sure of their path. After all, the stairs only go one direction, and where the stairs end, those people build the rest in a straight line, rise over run, to take them to the top of the mountain. I watch everyone celebrate them. I read their books and take notes. I spend two weeks of my life using their philosophy, going hard on my pursuit du jour…until I find something that captivates me more.

I hear them calling from the top of the mountain: celebratory yawps. They’ve just reached a new height and man, it feels good. Me, I’m down here kicking up dust on the meandering path, full of switchbacks and circuitous routes. I’m heading upward, too, stopping to rub my fingers on the rosemary, sitting to take in the changing views, dancing to an inspiring tune in my headphones, then walking on. This is how I do it, and I love every little sensual experience. So why do their cascading echoes stir jealousy in me?

When a musician or actor I know gains “overnight success” because they’ve been indefatigably focused on one goal for a decade, I flog myself for not having done the same. When I hear about the regulated schedules and steady paychecks of my lawyer and therapist friends, I wonder if it wouldn’t just have been easier for me to have done what my mom begged of me as a teenager, and become a master at one thing, forsaking all other interests. I’m thinking of my high school boyfriend, who wanted to be a doctor since he was a kid. (His screenname on AOL instant messenger was DocMark22, for crying out loud.) He’s now one of the top doctors at one of the top hospitals in the nation. Thriving!

We were two of the highest achievers in our school, always competing despite our mutual adoration, and now, while he’s spending his days curing cancer, I’m sitting at a coffee shop typing this essay, sweaty in running shorts because I power-walked here in a weighted vest after doing a balance board workout to re-up my surfing skills for a trip to the beach next week (a workout that was interrupted by my playing guitar for 15 minutes because I had a song idea). Before that, I got my children off to school, stayed to oversee their class’s “Book in a Bag” program, then texted my bandmates about the photographer who is coming to our practice tonight. After picking up the kids, hanging with them and making dinner, I’ll spend the 1.5 hours on the road to band practice listening to someone’s inspirational autobiography or a self-help tome on creativity. I’ll let those words inspire thoughts for the silly little vertical videos I’ve been creating in the process of finding my audience for the coaching programs I’m developing. I will practice punk rock with the bros, pose for the photographer, and then use the pics sometime tomorrow (during my substitute teaching gig) in a curated social media post to advertise next week’s show.

(SF people come to Local Bylaws’ show on 4/29 @ Bottom of the Hill!)

ADH-Me?

I am aware that my life is probably DocMark22’s worst nightmare (I’ll have to catch up with him and find out). And in those moments of forgetting my own purpose, looking up the mountain and believing I should be somewhere I’m not, it can be my worst nightmare, too. Many times, the world has convinced me that something is wrong with me. I temporarily embraced the ADHD label, reading the books and watching the videos about people whose brains are wired like my own (all of whom are creative powerhouses and many of whom are successful within, and in spite of, our society’s standards). Those resources did help me find some “best practices” for navigating our current world in a more peaceful, productive way, and I’m grateful for that. Namely, I have learned to be kind to my future self by doing very sucky unfun things like cleaning the kitchen and setting my coffeemaker the night before, making schedules and trying to stick to them, and relying on lists.

But I’ve decided: I no longer claim the ADHD moniker. This acronym does not resonate. “Disordered?” Mothafucka, there is an order to what I’m doing. The order is what my inner fire dictates. Yes, I can be “hyperactive,” which means, I can accomplish ten times more tasks in an allotted time than you can, as long as I’m interested in them. And no, I do not have a “defecit” of attention. In fact, you should see me hyperfocus for hours when I’m in an artistic flow state; I am so focused I forget to eat! You’re gonna pathologize me for not submitting to the mundane, pedestrian crap that you, editors of the DSM-5, have decided I should be focusing on? Naw, I see through this: ADHD is a label created by The Man to keep the disruptors in our place, lest our creative solutions and innovative side quests derail your entire system. And come on…is it really a “disability” if, like, half of people’s brains are wired this way? Damn the man.

Nevertheless, my path of least resistance has caused a lot of resistance in those who don’t see its value. I remember one particular college (theater) professor refusing to write me a recommendation for (creative writing) grad school because he claimed that I was too “unfocused”—simply because I wasn’t interested in staying on the theater track. I remember the terror of scraping together rent money in my twenties because I elected to juggle three “fun” part-time jobs instead of taking the boring 9-5 I was offered. I remember multiple existential crises, weeping to partners and friends, convinced I was a loser and wasn’t playing this life game correctly.

The Myth of Singular Focus

Each messy cry over my loserdom has had one thing in common: I have been comparing myself to a Michelangelo, awed by their dedication to one art form, swamped by the truth that I could never achieve the same without cutting out 75% of what I love on this Earth. I couldn’t spend three years on one giant, sexy David sculpture, or four years of extreme physical strain to finish the Sistine Ceiling. I’ll never be a Michelangelo, a DocMark22, a Michael Jordan, or a Steve Jobs. I want to do it all! I want to taste every flavor! I know this. I don’t want to sacrifice my physical fitness, romantic love, travel, and other artistic pursuits just to become legend in one subject! So why do I mourn a mastery of focus that I never had in the first place?

Because I want to be great, too, dammit. And they tell me that only this kind of unwavering commitment can leave a mark.

And then I realize: I’m discounting Da Vinci.

Leonardo Da Vinci wasn’t sitting at home whining because he could never compare in artistic merit to this single-minded youth. Da Vinci was too busy scribbling novel ideas and to-do lists backward in notebooks, studying all subjects that interested him, inventing flying machines, making music, and painting rich people’s wives with techniques he made up. He wasn’t focused on the end product, neurotic over what others would think. At least I don’t imagine he was; if he didn’t like the sketch he’d done, he’d paint over it. He was following his curiosity, wherever it took him.

So fuck off, Prof from 2006! I’m not “unfocused.” I’m a Renaissance Gal—a Da Vinci. I left the theater and got that Master’s in English without that recommendation letter, enjoying every moment. Normies thought this meant I was settling down to become an English teacher, but really I was just basking in the glow of the sweet, sweet poetry workshops and existential debates. When I graduated, I moved to L.A. and worked in the movies, sang with my band on the Sunset Strip, took care of a teenager, took up surfing, and published a novel, among 500 other less defining pursuits. I followed what sparked my interest, and when something no longer felt relevant, I put it on a shelf to focus on something else.

It took me a while, but I finally figured out what made me a Da Vinci and not just a schlub with ADHD.

When One Flow State Isn’t Enough

Brains like mine are the way they are because they need more dopamine than the standard model, and they get that from stimulation. This can be a disability or a superpower, depending on what we use to get our hit. I could have selected “eating cheese puffs and watching Beavis and Butthead” as my primary source of dopamine, but instead, I choose flow, which, I believe, not only gives me purpose, but does contribute to society.

My singular passion is concocting a big idea, then taking steps to create it. I’m always looking for that magical place where I can bend time, losing myself in a torrent of words I’m writing, music I’m playing, a piece of art I’m making for a friend. I can rack focus between them like a master prime lens. I can also find that flow by showing something new to my children, or having a discourse with one of my favorite people.

I used to believe what they said: that I needed to find the thing at the expense of all others. But now I understand, that’s not for everyone, and that does not preclude me from being a genius in my own right. In fact, the most interesting people are the ones with a hand in everything. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman knew it.

“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing.”

-R.W. Emerson “Self-Reliance”

The genius lies in the ability to see patterns and make connections. I cross-pollinate all of all my chosen domains, allowing each to inform and enhance the others.

How I Do it All

First, I have to be able to remind myself why I’m choosing to live this way, why it’s worth it to me. It all starts with my values: authenticity, freedom, beauty, and connection. I hold these truths to be self-evident: that I can only uphold these values if I am living in accordance with my passion, that I can only connect when I am looking for the beauty in everything, that I am only free when I understand that I have everything I need inside myself. Now that I’ve internalized that, I can take inventory of my limitations:

• TIME. I am not Hermione Granger with a time turner. I’m a muggle and time is finite.

• MONEY. This society rewards specialists. Art is considered an extracurricular in our current era, and getting paid without a traditional jobby-job is not a given.

• PEOPLE. They ain’t gonna understand. There’s going to be judgment, there’s going to be push-back from those who think I’m “not serious” or “unfocused.”

These are the reasons I sometimes find myself wishing I were a specialist. If I had a 9-5 and a one-track mind, time would all get dedicated to that one thing, for which I’d make money and get respect from people. But that’s not for me, so here’s what I have to do instead:

1. I make goals and a loose plan. I know all the long-term projects I’m working on and I have dedicated lists/notes for all. I set monthly, weekly, and daily goals for each, and see them as guidelines. Right now, I aim monthly for two YouTube Videos and an interview for my to-be-released podcast. I aim weekly for one Substack essay, one focus session on new music I’m making, and four weight training sessions. Daily, I try to get 10,000 steps, and also make a vertical video. Do I always achieve all this? Naw, but…

2. I commit. Since I know I’m not going to be “on” every week, it’s my commitment to my projects that keeps me going. For better or worse, I promise myself to keep breathing life into all my ventures, knowing I will take longer to finish than might be comfortable, and that maybe I’ll never “succeed” in the traditional sense. But the process is what blows my hair back. I can’t actually go hard on everything all at once; I’d burn out, and the quality of everything would suffer. And I can’t pull blood from a stone (or passion for something that I need a break from). So…

3. I go with the flow. Sometimes, like this week, my band and my family take center stage, because I have two shows and a vacation coming up. This means I fall behind on all other creations. But there’s still a pilot light burning for them; they are not forgotten: I record a little tune that wakes me up in the night. I type a note on a video idea that comes to me. I try to be as consistent as possible, but if I need rest, I rest, and if something feels awful to me, I wait until it feels good again.

4. I make money plans. Financial planning has not historically been my forte, but this year I’m focusing on building coaching programs that draw on all my experiences: my creative practices, my personal boundaries journey, and my relationship insights. Because people have started coming to me for advice, and because I have a unique way of viewing the world from all my diverse experiences, I’ve finally begun to realize that I do have a lot to offer. For the time being, I make money substituting high school classes that need so little supervision it’s almost like going to a coworking space. I get so much done, while getting paid! It’s something I’ve found through trial and error, and it’s working for now.
   

I Haven’t Figured it All Out

This is just my journey as of 2025: the journey of realizing that all these side quests are not distractions from my purpose; they are my purpose. We Renaissance people are the connectors. We bridge all the disparate domains, and this isn’t a flaw, this is the design. The world might not understand it yet, but I’m hoping to do my part to help.

If you want to know more about my scattered adventures, this is about my experience in the workforce:

I Am Qualified for Nothing

If you want to follow me elsewhere online, here’s links.