A few days ago, I found myself having the same conversation I’ve had countless times throughout my life. Someone looked at everything I do and said, “But you do too many things. You need to choose. You should focus on one path, otherwise you’re just spreading yourself too thin. You need to actually achieve something.”

I tried to explain myself, as I always do. I tried to describe what it feels like to be interested in many things at once, to move from one passion to another without feeling like I’m betraying any of them. I tried to explain that, to me, these different parts don’t compete with each other. They feed each other. I don’t think I was understood, and for the first time I realised that maybe that’s okay.

Because this isn’t the first time I’ve heard these words. I’ve heard them in different forms for as long as I can remember, always carrying the same message: choose, decide, commit, stick to one thing. At school, they ask you what you want to be when you grow up as if you’re supposed to choose a character and play that role for the rest of your life.

I’ve never known how to answer that question. Depending on the day, I would say DJ, artist, clothes maker, photographer, future tattoo artist, always feeling as though I was leaving an important part of myself out. For a long time, I believed there was something wrong with me. Maybe I was too scattered, too inconsistent, too curious. Maybe everyone else was right.

But looking back, I realised something important: I never truly suffered because of the way I am. I suffered because of the way other people made me feel about it. If you remove the outside noise, I actually love living this way. I love learning new things, I love being a beginner again, I love discovering passions I didn’t know I had, and I love the possibility that, at forty-six, I can still become someone I haven’t met yet.

People often talk about embracing diversity. We celebrate individuality, admire people who dare to be themselves, and repeat how important it is to respect differences. But I sometimes wonder if we love diversity more in theory than in practice, because when we meet someone who genuinely lives differently, our first instinct is often to guide them back towards something familiar.

“But you should choose.” “But that’s not realistic.” “But at your age…”

I don’t believe these words always come from cruelty. Most of the time, they come from people who genuinely think they’re helping, people who believe they’re showing you the path towards a happier, more stable, more successful life. And yet, the message received on the other side sounds very different: your way of being makes me uncomfortable. I can only understand you if I can fit you into something I already know.

Maybe truly accepting diversity means letting go of the idea that there is only one correct way to live. It means accepting that some people find peace in continuity while others find it in transformation; that some people choose one path and walk it for a lifetime, while others build their way through the world by collecting seemingly disconnected pieces along the road. Neither life is more valuable than the other.

Perhaps diversity isn’t only about what we can immediately see. It isn’t only about our bodies, our gender, the colour of our skin, or who we love. There is also diversity in the way people inhabit the world, in the way they think, in the way they create, and in the way they build their happiness. Maybe respect begins there: by stopping ourselves from correcting what we simply don’t understand.

It took me forty-six years to get here, to say this without guilt. I don’t need everyone to understand me, and I don’t need to convince people that my way of existing is valid. I can explain it if they want to listen, but if they don’t, that’s okay too, because I have finally stopped asking for permission to be the person I already am.

Maybe I will never have a single label attached to my name. Maybe I will continue falling in love with new disciplines at forty-six, fifty, and sixty. Maybe I won’t achieve things in the way the world expects me to. But this isn’t distraction, and it isn’t failure. This is curiosity. This is hunger for life.

And after spending so many years believing that there was something wrong with me, I can finally say it without shame: I am happy this way. I believe everyone deserves the freedom to build a happiness that looks like them, instead of spending their lives chasing the version that makes other people comfortable.