Human Design Living: Nonlinear productivity & truth-based momentum

I remember the first Human Design reading I ever had. They offered me two hours for free because they wanted to hear about my lived experience. They leaned into the camera, asked question after question, and by the end I felt completely understood. And then, strangely, I felt validated in a way that was uncomfortable. My life had always been contradictory and nonlinear. Having language for it didn’t immediately make it easier, it just made it clearer. Queue the existential grief.

Being a 5/1 Pure Manifesting Generator with four left arrows means I operate like a living manual. I need comprehension before I can feel connection or catharsis in my own body. As a 5/1, I mirror and investigate constantly. I can communicate with almost anyone because I’m always studying, sometimes to the point of annoying myself with how curious I am. As a Pure Manifesting Generator, I have endless energy for what is aligned. When I’m unclear or out of alignment, I operate more like a Manifestor: resting, pulling back, waiting for clarity. Feeling depleted and cloudy, I rest and stay still. Then clarity arrives. I inform what feels honest for me and momentum builds. My energy returns all at once and then I find myself doing many things I love, that I was building upon all along that seemed so disparate to me before they all came together.

The four left arrows mean I need to read every line, reference, and context before something clicks. Not just for me, but so I can universalize it for anyone I might support with my 5/1 nature as well. Only then can I feel what’s true in my body. This creates a strange dynamic where I’m often perceived as someone who “has it all figured out.” Not because I do, but because I need understanding before movement. This means I can only be deeply supported by people willing to face their own insecurities when they get close to me, especially when I’m mid-learning and feeling like a confused baby in the arena of endless adulting. It’s giving X-Men, think Rouge how she can't kiss her boo without hurting him. Or Jean, needing help but being so frustrated that she can’t understand herself and anyone that tries to understand her will have to feel themselves more deeply AND show up for themselves and her. It’s just a lot. I used to cringe at how much I loved Human Design and after year seven of deconditioning, I am so normal feeling that it’s comedic I can reference X-Men. Now that I have language for energy dynamics I can accept my nature and others ways of existing and just keep it moving along.

Support often arrives through new people during those moments of not knowing. Intimacy with familiar people deepens at the same time as well. That polarity is very 5/1. It’s the gift and the burden of being able to universalize experience: compassion born from not being met, and from learning inside those gaps. While also experiencing new intimacies and ways of being with familiar loved ones allowing them to become a new version of themselves to support me in becoming a new version of myself. It’s deep. Submarine style immersions in moments of need and then boom - I’m back on land and moving through the world within hours…. Can you now understand why I’m an integrationist - if I don’t constantly integrate I can’t be me.

When I was younger, this looked like creating seven self-healing decks while navigating a very public career and living on land projects. I didn’t know what I was feeling or needed, so I gave myself long stretches of solo time to journal, research, attend workshops - anything that would help me comprehend my lived reality without messing up in public or being seen as too intense. Thankfully I’ve dropped my anxiety around the latter two possibilities of being perceived as human! lol

I’d been doing this since childhood. My parents filled our house with encyclopedias and books far beyond our reading level. Learning was the only thing I truly loved. Looking back, it was because I couldn’t understand how people applied hierarchy, contradicted themselves, or avoided accountability. Yes, I know…old soul behavior. Human Design gave me language for something deeper: I don’t just need to learn endlessly. I also need routine, clarity, and permission to start, stop, and pivot when it’s correct. That’s the magic of MG life - we create and exist outside of all binaries and from within the liminal places that others can’t reach or recognize. We make magic of what seems impossible or out of order. It’s from our non-linear way of being that we better understand the value of processes/frameworks we do have to work within and with.

As I shared my life stories with my first teacher, we noticed a pattern. Every project, person, or disruption led me exactly where I needed to be: never how I expected, always in a way that was honest and clarifying. It’s been humbling to live this way. To be able to track patterns and anticipate seasons without knowing the how…. It’s polarizing for not just me but all involved. I can be exactly what someone needs, then suddenly repulsive to them when reality shifts. Sometimes that happens in hours. Sometimes in years. Each time, it’s a reminder: this chapter is complete. Move toward what’s true north, give gratitude, grieve and accept the forever change that life is.

Because of this, I learned early in my career how to ask better questions. Not just about deliverables, but about capacity, motives, values, and limits. I use my mirroring ability to create frameworks where people can be themselves and where I don’t have to parent or manage emotionally. We all know how that ends. My life has moved in cycles because of this. Years in full-time roles, making art privately. Then years of contracts, retreats, research, and apprenticeship. Sometimes years of both ways of being at once. This eventually led to my recent sabbatical after a decade of go, go, go - not as escape, but a season of integration.

Now, I’m in a quieter phase. Less certain about the “how,” deeply clear about the “why.”

I inform. I stay available. And when invitations arrive, I’m ready to engage.

That’s my experience of nonlinear productivity. That’s what I consider experiencing truth-based momentum.

Thanks to the language and frameworks of Human Design - I know I’m exactly who I’m meant to be.

This is why I now enjoy guiding others as a coach to learn how to live into their design as well.

It feels so good to experience more people seeing their life as an experiment to see just how much they can truly live out their unique design.