The Projection Field: On Being a 5/1, My Grandmother, and Coming Back Visible

My phone hasn't stopped ringing in two weeks.

Not texts. Calls. People wanting to pick my brain, get my read on something, ask how I "see things the way I see them." I've been back in New York for about a month, but word only really got around two weeks ago, and since then it's been a steady stream of people projecting greatness onto me. It feels incredible. It also feels like a trapdoor if I'm not careful.

I sat with that last night — the good kind of overwhelmed, but overwhelmed all the same — and had to consciously remember who I am, separate from what anyone, kind or unkind, decides to project onto me. That's not a new lesson. It's one I've been writing about for the whole book.

Being a 5/1

If you know Human Design, you know the 5th line carries what's called the projection field. People see you and immediately hand you a role — savior, guide, fixer, the one who'll finally have the answer. Sometimes that projection is glowing. Sometimes it's the opposite: people decide who you are before you've said a word, and you spend your life being punished or worshipped for a version of you that was never quite accurate.

Meghan Markle is a 5/1 too. Watching what's been projected onto her over the years — the wild swings from "inspiring" to "calculating," often for the same behavior depending on who's doing the looking — has been like watching my own experience under a microscope. Not because our lives are the same, but because the mechanism is the same. The 5th line doesn't get to just exist. It gets interpreted, and other people's interpretations start arriving before you've even walked into the room.

I know that field intimately, and not just as an adult with a public-facing brand. I knew it as a child.

The child who got projected on

Some of the ugliest projections I ever carried didn't come from strangers. They came early, close, and they weren't about anything I'd actually done — they were about what I represented to the person doing the projecting. That's the part nobody tells you about the 5th line: it starts before you have language for it. You just absorb the role you've been cast in and spend years figuring out which parts were ever really you.

I write about this at length in the book, alongside a moment with my grandmother that's stayed with me since it happened. It was at my aunt's party. Her dementia was well along by then, and when she first saw me, she didn't know who I was — she just saw a woman in front of her, and she told me how beautiful I was, took my hand, and said it was so warm and sweet. Twenty minutes later, the recognition caught up to her. She remembered I was her granddaughter. And in that same breath, she told me my dress was ill-fitting and that I was too old to be wearing it.

Same woman. Same twenty minutes. The only thing that changed was whether she knew who I was supposed to be. Without the role, I was just warm and beautiful to her. With it, I was something to correct. That's the whole mechanic in miniature — the projection doesn't respond to you, it responds to what it's decided you represent.

Visible again

Houston, for all it gave me, made me feel invisible. New York is the opposite problem. I am not invisible here — I'm the furthest thing from it, and the calls prove it every day. That's a gift. It's also exactly the condition the 5th line warns you about: visibility invites projection, good and bad, and the good ones can sweep you up just as easily as the bad ones can wound you.

So last night's job wasn't to shrink back from the calls or the attention. It was to stay resolute — to take in what people see in me without letting it replace what I know about myself. That's the whole practice of a 5/1 life. Not avoiding the projection field. Learning to stand in it without dissolving.

If any of this is landing for you — if you've ever felt handed a role you didn't ask for, good or bad — check your Human Design in Mami Wata's Mirror and see where your own projection field lives. Most sites will give you your astrology or your Human Design. The Mirror gives you both together, because you were never meant to read one without the other. And if you want the fuller story — the grandmother, the child, the whole arc — Full Access membership gets you there.