How I Discovered I Don’t Have ‘One True Calling’

I was required to declare a purpose, and almost couldn’t comply.

Remember when you were a tiny human and everyone always asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up?

I’m closer to 30 than 20 (!) and I still don’t know what I want to be when I “grow up.”

More accurately, there isn’t just one thing I want to be. I want to be many different things. All at the same time. Because stress is a drug and I guess I’m hooked.

Only when I first started listening to The Limit Does Not Exist did I realize there wasn’t something wrong with my brain. I wasn’t psychologically incapable of choosing a path.

I was just part of a subset of humans who aren’t built to venture down just one road.

Long before I found the podcast, I entered my senior year of college. It was then that I began to realize not everyone has one “calling.”

It all started at the beginning of fall semester, when my Christian Faith seminar professor asked all of us to talk about the lives we’d been called by Jesus Christ to follow.

Whether you’re religious or anything but, the idea that everyone was put on the Earth for a specific purpose comforts and guides many along their quest to find a place in the world.

My private Christian university simply looked at “future planning” through a lens of divine faith.

Unexpectedly, I’d been all but assigned the task of revealing to my seminar (or, at the very least, to my professor) where I wanted to steer the course of my life after graduation.

I had no idea how to complete such a task.

But my Type A self couldn’t simply not do a homework assignment. So, having gone on a missions trip to Guatemala the semester before with a group of fellow nutrition students, I “declared” my calling: The oh-so-small ambition of ending world hunger.

Go big or all but fail the easiest class I’d take that year, I guess.

It didn’t end there.

I took another seminar that same semester for college seniors preparing to enter the workforce. We had mock job interviews, reflected on the past four years, and spent what felt like weeks writing professional mission statements.

Yes. Mission statements. One-sentence summaries that encompassed everything we wanted to accomplish as real-world working professionals.

I almost turned my assignment in late. Not (entirely) because of my tendency to procrastinate, but because writing a mission statement that squeezed everything I cared about into one literal box almost killed me.

I took voice lessons. Studied food. Read more books than most people explore in a lifetime. How was I supposed to write one sentence that expressed how much I cared about all of these things and more?

Honestly, I don’t even remember what I ended up writing. I lost all my files from those four years when my hard drive crashed in 2014.

But I turned something in for the sake of turning something in. Again.

By the end of fall semester, I had no one true calling. No professional mission statement I actually planned to follow. And no idea, going into my final semester of full-time college, if I’d even chosen the right majors.

Fast-forward four months. I was weeks away from graduation. Just barely getting through it. And once again, an instructor pushed me to think harder than I wanted to about my future.

One of my English professors and I were heading to a Shakespeare play (which happened to fall the day before a major chemistry exam, which left me feeling stressed enough in the silence) when she asked me an out-of-nowhere question I almost couldn’t answer.

(Why are college professors so GOOD at that?)

She said something along the lines of, “Do you feel torn between dietetics and English?”

It wasn’t uncommon for students to double-major. But it WAS common for their chosen subjects to overlap and relate to one another.

It was difficult to see, at the time, how choosing two courses of study on opposite sides of the academic spectrum could benefit anyone.

I didn’t know how to answer that question, either. I certainly felt like my majors were trying to rip me in half every time I had to sacrifice valuable chemistry study time to finish writing a literature analysis due the following morning — right before a grade-defining test.

I must have eventually answered. Probably something vague yet satisfactory, like: “I plan on figuring out how to make them fit together somehow.”

Weirdly, that’s exactly what I ended up doing less than a year later when I started my graduate program in health communications. It just took finishing both undergraduate degrees to realize that’s the kind of program I wished I’d had to major in.

For years, I’d exhausted myself trying to decide which direction to go. It turned out I was headed the right direction all along. My direction just involved many different paths converging to form the start of my journey as a multipotentialite.

I didn’t struggle to balance music classes, a science degree, and a love of reading and writing because I was indecisive. I’d begun a journey toward a Life of Many Interests long before I knew I was even allowed to live like that.

You don’t have to be Just One Thing. You don’t have to excel in Just One Field. You don’t have to specialize in anything, if you don’t want to. If your heart is constantly telling you that’s not right.

You can be a little bit of everything.

I’m really glad that — whether they meant to or not — my instructors, one by one, helped me realize that.

The hard questions make us think. And pursuing the answers we don’t believe we’re capable of formulating is how discoveries happen.

Maybe your calling is that you don’t have just one. Once you realize that, you grant yourself the freedom necessary to pursue any interest or skill that captivates you as you study, laugh, dance, excel, and discover your way through the decades to come.

It’s stressful. Sometimes you might still feel pulled in a dozen different directions. But you’re a problem-solver. A doer. You’ll figure out how to make it work. Even if that means taking things a day at a time.