A stranger in the mirror, and the strange gift she left behind.
I spent most of my life being told I was too much. Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too intense. Too deep for a light conversation. Too heavy for people who wanted things easy.
So I learned to shrink. To soften. To dim.
I learned to apologize for the volume of my feelings, for the depth of my questions, for the way I couldn't just "let things go."
And over time, I stopped recognizing the person in the mirror. She looked like me. She sounded like me. But she wasn't me. She was the version I'd been edited into — acceptable, palatable, safe.
Being "too much" cost me relationships that couldn't hold the weight of my truth. It cost me years of silence when I should have been screaming. It cost me friendships that were built on conditions I couldn't meet.
But here's what they don't tell you about being too much — it gave me back everything that mattered.
It gave me the courage to walk away from things that were slowly killing me. It gave me the ability to sit with people in their darkest moments and not look away. It gave me a voice that shakes sometimes but never stops speaking.
The people who told me I was too much were never my people. They were mirrors reflecting their own discomfort with depth, with vulnerability, with feeling.
So if you've ever been told you're too much, hear this: You are not too much. You are exactly enough. The world doesn't need you smaller. It needs you at full volume.