By: Dr. Aminah Knight
My best friend once told me that I have such an immigrant mentality. And before you think I should probably be offended, just know that I took it as a compliment and chuckled. I think what she meant by this is that I am always engaged in so much at once. There is this stereotype about immigrants that they have multiple jobs. Growing up in Brooklyn, this is something I would always hear about Caribbean people, that we have two, three, four jobs. But then as I got older and started watching Everybody Hates Chris, I also saw that stereotype portrayed about African Americans as well. So I really do not know who it belongs to or who it is directed at, but those are the places where I always heard it come up.
Anyway, I was telling my best friend about my latest idea, and somehow we ended up talking about the way I am. You know, I find myself asking myself all the time, “Aminah, why are you this way?” I will literally not eat. I will not sleep if I am working on a project. And when I really think about it, it feels like getting my thoughts out, or being able to live out a thought all the way to completion, is sometimes just as important to me as eating or sleeping.
Why would I deprive myself of other things that are important, things that I actually need to do, just to finish a project? But I guess, for me, it is not really about finishing a project. It is about living out my thoughts. It is about not keeping them trapped inside of me. Because when I do, I feel like I am suffering inside. I feel stifled. It is almost like there is a muzzle on me, and I just cannot deal with that feeling. Sometimes I feel like I am in a romance with my ideas. And in order for that romance to really be lived out, I need to see those ideas outside of me. I need to be able to look at them, touch them, and experience them with my senses. When they are still inside of me, it feels like I cannot quite get to them. They are there, but they are trapped somewhere I cannot fully reach. So I keep working until I can finally bring them into the world and experience them as something real.
And saying that out loud actually helps me understand myself a little better. I think I have kept that feeling inside for a long time because it sounded too strange to say. Who says something like that? Who says they need to experience their ideas with their senses? But it is my truth, and when I really think about it, it explains so much about the way I move through the world. It explains why I get so deeply invested in creating things. It explains why an idea can stay with me and nag at me until I finally do something with it. And it makes sense when I think about the person I have always known myself to be, someone who experiences life very intensely through her senses.
I have been that way for as long as I can remember. I notice little things. Even when I am cooking, I find myself paying attention to sounds, textures, and smells that probably do not matter to most people. I think the people who understand what I mean are the ones who know that sometimes you can hear when food is right. If you make macaroni and cheese, for example, there is a certain macaroni and cheese sound. Those who get it, get it. You can almost close your eyes, stir the pot, and listen for that sound that tells you there is exactly the right amount of moisture, gooeyness, and cheesiness. And then there is the smell. You know that warm, cheesy smell that tells you something is coming together before you have even taken a bite. You do not only have to taste it to know it is right, and you do not only have to look at it. Somehow, you can hear it and smell it too. That is how I experience so many things. I want the fullness of the experience. And maybe that is part of why ideas feel incomplete to me when they stay inside my head. Thinking them is one thing. I want to know what they become.
This very website is actually a perfect example. I built it from the ground up back in 2020 as the website for my daycare. I did not know anything about how to build a website, so I taught myself. I watched YouTube tutorials, learned my way around WordPress, figured out hosting, and pieced the whole thing together on my own. I could have used one of those easier website builders where everything is basically already set up and you just plug in your information, but at the time those options were more expensive. So I found a hosting company that worked for me and learned how to build the site myself instead.
It was completely outside of my zone of excellence, but once I decided I needed a website for the daycare, I got completely engrossed in figuring it out. Looking back, I think part of the reason I felt so strongly about creating it was because I needed to bring that vision outside of myself and make it something real. Most recently, I started looking back at this website I created in 2020 and thinking, “Oh my gosh, I am so different now. This needs a makeover.” And there I went again. Sleepless nights. Popping up in the middle of the night because I thought of something else I wanted to add. Sitting there thinking the site was finally finished, only to realize there was another piece of myself I wanted it to hold.
This time, that new piece was a space for articles like this one. I wanted somewhere within the daycare’s website where I could share my reflections on family, children, travel, work, and whatever else happens to be living loudly in my mind at the time. So once again, the website became one of those projects that completely pulled me in. I was spending what was probably a ridiculous amount of time working on it, tweaking things, rearranging things, thinking about what I wanted it to say, and staying up too late because I had one more thing I wanted to fix. And the funny thing is, I do not even know who is going to read any of this. I do not know what the response will be. I do not know whether ten people will read these articles or ten thousand. But that has never really been the point. It is the release. It is the feeling of taking something that has been living inside of me and finally putting it somewhere outside of myself. Once it exists, once I can see it, once I can say, “There it is,” something in me settles down. That is the part I think people cannot necessarily see when they look at all of the things I am doing from the outside.
So when my best friend says I have this “immigrant mentality,” I get what she means. I think she means the busyness of it all, the idea that I will just do what I have to do. And I definitely have a history of doing exactly that. There was a time when my husband, our children, and I were living overseas in the United Arab Emirates. I was working there as a head of school, and our bills were just really high. We had so many things we needed to pay for. My husband was transitioning from living in the United States to being full-time with us in the UAE, and he had started a car dealership there, so he was working on building that.
Meanwhile, I was trying to supplement our income too. So while I had my position at the school, I was also cooking for people. I created something called Tasty Lasagna Tuesday because all of my friends felt like I made the best lasagna. So I started making lasagna for people. And then I would tutor families too. I was doing all of it. I felt like an octopus. And I am pretty sure I was pregnant during some of that time too, because I spent what feels like half of my years in the UAE pregnant. Okay, not half. That is an exaggeration. But I did give birth to two of my six children while I was living there.
So I understand what my friend sees. From the outside, it probably looks like, “Wow, she is such a busybody,” or maybe, “She is such a go-getter.” I really do not know how it appears to other people. But if somebody could see inside of me, I think they would see something different. They would see somebody who simply does not want to feel stifled. Somebody who needs to live out her thoughts. Not every thought, of course, but the burning ones; the ones that allow me to be a positive contributor to society.
You know those ideas that just keep coming back, the ones that will not leave you alone? Those are the ones I have to get off my chest and out of my mind. I need to put them outside of myself. I need to see what they look like once they exist in the real world. But then comes the other side of that. What does that kind of intensity lead to? Oh my gosh. I will ignore other parts of myself. I will ignore my family. I will delay going to bed. Sometimes I will pop up out of my sleep in the middle of the night once I know the house is quiet so I can continue working on whatever idea has captured me.
And that leaves me wondering, do I actually want to fix this? Is this a “problem,” Or is this simply me? I think we live in a world where there is a label for almost everything. And I understand why labels can be useful. But sometimes I wonder whether everything about a person needs to be fixed, diagnosed, corrected, or made more normal. Sometimes something is simply part of the uniqueness of a person, and I think that is totally fine. We are supposed to be unique. Our differences are part of what makes the world colorful.
So I do not necessarily want to get rid of this part of myself. I actually love the fact that I have ideas. I love that I get excited. I love that when something lights a fire in me, I can throw myself into it and bring something into existence that was not there before. But what I do know is that, as I am getting older, I have to watch how I do it. Sitting in a chair too long typing hurts my back nowadays. Not drinking enough fluids throughout the day because I am hyper-focused on something leaves me dehydrated and gives me a headache. Staring at a screen for too long gives me a headache. Pushing myself until I physically cannot keep going means that the next day I might be left feeling like I cannot move and need to stay in bed all day. And I do not like that feeling.
Not long ago, I was talking about this with a group of sister friends I meet with every week. We come together and talk about God, life, love, family, and everything in between. We always have a book that we are reading together. The book we were discussing at the time was called “A Journey to God”, and there was a part about balance that made me bring up this question: How do you know when to stop when there is something you have such a burning desire to do?
One of my friends said something really beautiful. She said everything in life has a place, and everything has an amount of time that should be given to it. You know you are giving too much to one thing when you start neglecting the others. And when I thought about it, I was like, yeah, I guess it is like when I am working on a passion project and it is time to cook dinner, but I tell myself, “I will cook in an hour.” Then an hour passes, and now it is actually time for my family to be eating, and I say, “I’ll be there in 15 minutes.” At that point, I have gone beyond the boundary. Cooking deserves time, love, and attention. My dad used to always say that the secret ingredient in my cooking was love. Sitting down to eat with the family matters too. That is time for bonding, sharing, reflecting, and simply looking into each other’s eyes.
So I am learning that maybe the goal is not to become less passionate. Maybe I do not have to stop being the person who gets excited about ideas and wants to run with them. Maybe I just need to stop waiting until my body forces me to stop. I am trying to have more conversations with myself. “Aminah, that is enough for today.” Or sometimes, “Aminah, I will give you one more hour.”
I already do this in business. As a business owner, sometimes I literally tell myself, “Aminah, you have this deadline, and if you do not meet it, you are fired.” And let me be clear, I am not like this with my staff. I am clear with them, but I am also gentle, and I care deeply about how I lead them. This is really about the way I have learned to manage myself because I know myself. I know how easily I can get pulled into one idea, distracted by another, or convince myself that I have more time than I actually do. So sometimes I have to give myself these exaggerated little consequences just to snap myself back into focus. I will even laugh at myself when I say it, but it works.
I am learning now that I need to use that same discipline that I apply to business, not just to push myself forward, but to know when to stop.
I do not want to lose the part of me that gets excited by ideas or feels compelled to bring them to life. I love that part of myself. I just want to become better at recognizing when passion has crossed over into depletion. I want to learn how to let an idea wait until tomorrow without feeling like I have abandoned it. But most importantly, I want to learn how simply say to myself, “Aminah, that is enough for today.”