For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t function in a linear way.

Because I couldn’t maintain the same rhythm day after day.

Because my interests move in waves.

Because sometimes a powerful current opens within me, bringing vision, inspiration, and the capacity to act, and then comes a quieter phase, a time of retreat, rest, reorientation, or seeming fragmentation.

For years I tried to force myself into a mold where a good person, a successful person, or a “functional” person is someone who performs consistently, like a machine.

But little by little, I’ve begun to see something different.

Maybe my true gift was never linearity.

Maybe my gift is the ability to move in cycles.

The ability to see connections between seemingly unrelated things.

The ability to feel, sense, weave together, create, journey deep into the unknown, and return carrying something that cannot be born through straightforward efficiency alone.

Nature does not operate linearly.

The seasons do not operate linearly.

Storms, rivers, forests, fire, the human body, sleep, inspiration, and love do not operate linearly.

So why would I try to build myself into a machine instead of a living part of nature?

I understand now that I do need structure, but living structure.

The kind that supports the flow instead of suppressing it.

And perhaps the greatest shift has not been learning to “manage myself.”

It has been stopping the habit of treating my natural rhythm as a flaw.

That is where an entirely different relationship with myself begins.

Not through constant self-correction.

But through collaboration.