We Contain Multitudes

This plant would like to grow
And yet be embryo;
Increase, and yet escape
The doom of taking shape;
Be vaguely vast, and climb
To the tip end of time
With all the space to fill,
Like boundless Igdrasil
That has the stars for fruit.
— from Richard Wilbur’s “Seed Leaves” (1964)

John Mangine stands in his basement before a large square canvas, pausing between brushstrokes. He cannot pause long. It’s mid-February 2024, and a collection of his bright, abstract acrylic paintings is scheduled to go up in a local gallery in two months. He’s not ready for the show, so he works quickly. “Maybe one out of 16 things I do I don’t hate,” he says. His small unfinished basement teems with canvases and the jumble of a middle-class, single-parent household—a jumbo pack of paper towels, old golf clubs, a box of dog biscuits, a souvenir seat cushion from Super Bowl XXVII. Not a great studio but a good expression of the unruly urgency he lives in.

Mangine is a study in creative adventure. The son of a truck driver and a nurse, he took up painting two years ago at the age of 44. Before that, he was deeply absorbed in the art of photography, itself a relatively recent passion. And before photography, there was craft brewing: he won national homebrew competitions and helped launch a successful brew pub for which he provided the name, the logo, and the recipes for its flagship beers.

It’s hard to mistake any of these creative pursuits for dabbling. Mangine is too accomplished—and his commitment to these endeavors too intense—for them to be described as hobbies. Yet Mangine does not make his living from any of them. He is the associate dean for academic support at the college where I taught English for 33 years before retiring in spring 2023. Like most of my colleagues, I first knew him as the person who issued notices on behalf of students with disabilities, granting them extra time on tests and papers, among other accommodations. Mangine himself has ADHD and dysgraphia, traits that for him help explain his affinity for both his job and his creative work.

By some bundle of talent, compulsion, energy, and circumstance, he is pursuing his creative passions fully enough to scramble the binaries we use to rank adult endeavor—vocation and avocation, profession and pastime, career and hobby. He makes some money from his art (he has a side business doing photographic portraits and has sold fine-art prints and a few paintings), but it is by noncapitalist standards that he is making himself an artist. Will he “make it” as an artist and do his art full-time? He’d love nothing more, he says. But he knows he already has something precious and rare: the thrill and fulfillment of being actively multitalented, of living in a state of ranging and ambitious self-expression.

Mangine’s example suggests something uplifting: thatweallcarrywithinusdeep wells of heterogeneous talent, not just for the things that, if we’re lucky, we’re good at in our jobs, but also other things we could do wonderfully well if circumstances allowed. The fact that so few Americans actively realize this, however, makes other realities visible: how fully culture and social circumstances suppress this way of knowing ourselves, and how disastrous this self-neglect is in our current moment, particularly for many people whose sense of self and purpose is tyrannized by their smartphones and the distortions of social media. What would it mean if we shifted how we knew ourselves to include a fuller sense of our gifts, if the controlling algorithms of more people’s lives included their own creativity?

Multipotentiality. This is the term some clinical counselors and life coaches now use for having many talents. As a scientific descriptor, it often treats the trait as innate or hardwired. For people made to feel odd for plunging into different interests, one after another, the label is more agreeable than, say, flakiness. Emilie Wapnick’s memorable 2015 TEDx talk on the challenges and advantages of being a “multipotentialite” gave the term greater currency; it also inspired a long trail of testimonials in the YouTube comments section, some expressing tearful relief and gratitude at the realization that they are not alone. The video is at once a locus of solidarity and de facto confirmation of the outsider status of multipotentialites.

By various baseline measures, we all are born with the potential to develop multiple talents, to nurture different ways of thinking and doing. The synaptic density and plasticity of an infant’s brain make cognitive versatility both a birthright and the distinction that explains the endurance of our species. A 2021 study led by geneticists at the American Museum of Natural History and other research institutions identified 267 genes that are unique to Homo sapiens, which might account for the genetic advantage underlying “the explosive emergence of creativity in modern humans in the period just before and after their widespread dispersal from Africa and the related extinction of Neanderthals and other human relatives,” as study coauthor Ian Tattersall explained. We could adapt, and so we survived. Our being here is our creativity’s affidavit.

Let’s acknowledge, too, that the definition of the word talent includes a sense of the exceptional that doesn’t entirely hold up. If by talent we mean skillful capacity, almost everyone is practicing an assortment of talents every day. Excellent restaurant servers are brilliant at reading faces; generating short, authentically warm conversations with strangers; remembering large orders; carrying giant trays with one hand; and moving through a chaotic space quickly, collision-free, for hours on end.

But few think of waiting on tables as the exercise of multiple talents. That notion is generally reserved for people whose skills have cultural prestige and are widely divergent, making them exceptions that prove the rule about everyone else’s supposed monolithic nature. Take Bob Childs, whom Wapnick mentioned in her TEDx talk. He is not only a psychologist but also an accomplished luthier whose violins are coveted by members of world-class orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. Or consider George W. Bush, who became a painter after leaving the White House and produced what New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has called work of “astonishingly high” quality, given the former president’s late start.