The Myth of Too Muchness

I have spent most of my life being told I was too much.

Too loud, too bossy, too sassy, too opinionated, too intense, too emotional, too curious, too hard to manage, too unwilling to sit still and make myself pleasant for people who preferred girls quiet, women agreeable, and truth served in portions small enough that nobody had to choke on it.

And for a long time, I believed them.

Nobody comes right out and tells a bright little girl that the safest thing she can do is disappear herself slowly. They just correct her in a thousand tiny ways until the correction starts to feel like wisdom. They tell her to lower her voice. They tell her not to ask so many questions. They tell her she is being disrespectful when she is naming something true. They tell her she is bossy when she has leadership skills, dramatic when she has feelings, and rude when she refuses to swallow a lie with a smile. Little by little, she starts learning which parts of herself are welcome and which parts make the grown-ups shift in their chairs.

Eventually, if the world works hard enough at it, a bubbly little girl can start to mistake her own sparkle for a character flaw.

I was a bright, extroverted little girl with ADHD in a world that did not know what to do with a bright, extroverted little girl with ADHD. So the world did what it so often does to girls who arrive already lit from the inside. It tried to dim me. I got in trouble for being myself at home, at school, in church, and just about anywhere else that rewarded obedience more than aliveness. And because I was also living through long-term trauma that would later show up in my body and nervous system as CPTSD, I did what children do when being themselves feels unsafe.

I adapted.

I learned to withdraw. I got quieter. I learned how to scan a room before entering it, how to measure my words before they left my mouth, how to shrink my laughter, hide my excitement, and over-explain myself until the original thought had been padded with enough disclaimers to make it acceptable for public consumption. I learned how to make myself more tolerable for people who were never going to understand me anyway.

And then, for most of my adult life, I called that being an introvert.

Ain’t that something?

A survival strategy can wear the mask of a personality for so long that you stop questioning whether it actually belongs to you.

Recently, my friend Nadene said something about me being an extrovert, and my immediate response was basically, “Ummm… only around people I feel comfortable with and aligned with.” Then the lightbulb flickered on so bright I nearly had to sit down. I am an extrovert. I have always been an extrovert. I am just an extrovert who learned to hide because hiding was safer than being mocked, corrected, punished, or misunderstood. I am an extrovert whose nervous system decided withdrawal was easier than constantly being told my natural state was too big for the room.

Once I saw that, I could not unsee it.

It made me wonder how many parts of ourselves we have mislabeled because the world punished us before we ever got to understand ourselves. How many women are walking around calling themselves shy when they are actually cautious? How many are calling themselves private when they are actually tired of being misread? How many are calling themselves low-maintenance when they are actually starving for depth but learned not to ask for too much? How many are calling themselves difficult when they are simply honest, perceptive, expressive, and allergic to pretending?

I do not hate people. I hate empty performance.

I cannot do small talk for the life of me. I can stand there and discuss the weather because I was raised right and I do know how to behave in public when the situation calls for it, but my soul is not fed by conversations that never leave the kiddie pool. I want the deep end. I want the winding road. I want the conversation that starts with somebody’s paint color and somehow ends up in childhood, grief, business, friendship, nervous systems, the meaning of beauty, and whether or not the ghost of Zelda Fitzgerald would approve of your curtains.

That is the kind of conversation I love.

Give me substance, and I can talk for hours. Let the conversation meander, let it wander down side streets and through secret gardens, let it pull up a chair and take its earrings off. That is where I come alive. That is where my brain starts making connections. That is where I can hear what someone is really saying underneath the words. For a long time, I thought that intensity made me hard to be around, but now I think it is one of the places where my muchness is the most useful.

I want to know what makes people come alive. I want to know how they found themselves, how they built their style, what they are dreaming toward, what they are afraid to say out loud, what keeps tugging at their sleeve in the middle of the night. I want to know where they get their inspiration because I think that is one of the most intimate and creative things a person can share. Most people have incredibly interesting, beautiful lives, even when they cannot see it themselves because they are standing too close to the mess of it. I can often see it. I can see the gold thread in their hands before they know they are holding it. I can see the roadblock, the longing, the place where they are giving their power away, the door they keep walking past because they do not realize it opens.

And I love helping them bust through.

That is part of my muchness. I listen with my whole self. I trust the part of me that knows how to connect dots, follow energy, read the room, and name the thing nobody has quite been able to name yet. I spent years thinking that made me overly intense, when the truth is that some people are starving for somebody to pay attention deeply enough to see them beneath the polished little story they have learned to tell.

The world has spent centuries teaching women to distrust the very parts of themselves that make them powerful. We are taught to water ourselves down until we are easier to swallow. We are taught that calm is more respectable than passion, that quiet is more acceptable than expression, that agreeable women are easier to love, and that being chosen is the prize we should organize our whole lives around. Somewhere along the way, many of us learn to trade our fullness for approval, then wonder why the approval never feels like nourishment.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that too muchness is one of the biggest lies ever handed to women.

Too much for whom?

Too much for people who prefer women as background music? Too much for people who like our labor but not our opinions? Too much for people who want our softness but not our standards? Too much for people who enjoy our magic as long as it stays decorative and never becomes disruptive?

A woman who knows herself is always going to be too much for someone invested in her confusion.

That does not make her wrong. It makes her awake.

And let me tell you something that has become clearer to me with every year, every therapy session, every journal entry, every meditation, every reiki healing, every hot flash, every boundary, every moment of refusing to hand the patriarchy another piece of my essence: I was never meant to become less. I was meant to become whole again.

Because the patriarchy did not simply steal opportunities from me. It stole my essence. It stole my personality, my joy, my intuition, and my voice. It convinced me that the careful, quiet, edited version of myself was maturity. It made me believe that being palatable was proof that I had finally gotten myself under control.

But healing has not made me smaller. Healing has made me more honest.

Healing has made me bolder, freer, stranger in the most honest sense, more willing to decorate my life like I live in it, and more willing to speak about politics because I can see the harm caused by silence and I refuse to pretend neutrality is noble when people are being hurt. Healing has made me more willing to talk about witchcraft, money, home, gardens, grief, pleasure, trauma, beauty, menopause, power, and all the other ingredients that make a life feel layered and satisfying.

Because I am not a sliver.

I am a whole person. And so are YOU.

And I think this is where so many women get tricked. We are told to pick a lane, pick a topic, pick a tone, pick a version of ourselves that is easiest for other people to understand. Be funny, but do not get angry. Be pretty, but do not get political. Be nurturing, but do not get ambitious. Be spiritual, but do not get too strange. Be successful, but do not become so visible that anybody starts sharpening their little knives behind the curtain.

The world loves a woman in pieces because pieces are easier to sort, sell, rank, tame, and dismiss.

But a whole woman is a feast.

And a feast will always overwhelm someone who only came looking for crumbs.

I think about this all the time in my work because the thing that has helped my audience the most is not that I picked one tiny topic and stayed neatly inside it. The power has come from letting my whole life weave together. The home, the garden, the witchcraft, the politics, the money, the soft life, the rage, the joy, the recipes, the beauty, the spiritual autonomy, the matriarchy, the canning jars, the big feelings, the hard truths, the ridiculous movie references, all of it belongs at the table.

That is where the richness comes from.

A great meal is not great because someone boiled one plain potato and called it a personality. It is the layering that makes it satisfying. The herbs, the salt, the acid, the fat, the sweetness, the heat, the thing you cannot quite name but would miss if it were gone. A life works the same way. A woman works the same way. We are not here to become one clean note played politely in the background. We are here to become orchestral.

And yes, sometimes that means understanding the way our brains and nervous systems shape our muchness.

For me, learning about ADHD, CPTSD, and aphantasia has helped me stop shaming myself for things that were never flaws in the first place. It has given me those “Oh, this is why I do this” moments that make the whole room rearrange itself in my mind. Once I understand why I do something, I can stop treating it like a problem to solve and start using it on purpose.

I use movie references constantly because I have aphantasia and cannot literally see things in my head. Movies give me a visual language. They give me frames, textures, moods, sets, rooms, costumes, gestures, weather. They help me explain what I cannot internally picture. For years, that could have been dismissed as me being dramatic or overly referential or too obsessed with stories, but now I understand it as one of the ways my brain builds a bridge between what I feel and what I can create.

That is the real epiphany.

The thing you thought made you strange may be part of your genius. The thing you thought made you hard to love may be the part of you that knows how to love most deeply. The thing you kept apologizing for may be the very thing someone else needs to see so they can stop apologizing too.

Maybe your emotions are evidence that you are still alive in places other people abandoned. Maybe your politics come from an unwillingness to stay silent while harm is happening. Maybe your intensity means you were born with a soul that refuses to skim the surface. Maybe your weirdness is where the door is. Maybe the parts of you that feel the most inconvenient are the places where your muchness is waiting to be trusted.

That is what I want women to understand more than anything.

You do not need to keep shrinking around the parts of yourself that make other people uncomfortable. You do not need to apologize for the color, volume, texture, hunger, ache, rage, pleasure, curiosity, or brilliance of your own aliveness. If you have spent years watering yourself down, the first taste of your own fullness can feel almost reckless. It can feel like too much laughter at the table, too much color in the room, too much truth in your mouth, too much desire in your body, too much ambition in your chest, too much joy spilling out of you before you can tidy it up for company.

Let it spill. Let it flood the little rooms that could never hold you anyway.

There is a reason Alice-in-Wonderland’s muchness has stayed with so many of us. There is something hauntingly familiar about a girl wandering through a strange world, being told the rules do not make sense and yet somehow being expected to obey them. There is something familiar about shrinking and growing and questioning whether you are the problem when the world around you is absurd.

But the part that matters most is the remembering.

That moment when a woman realizes her muchness was never the flaw.

It was the power.

That is what has been coming back to life in me. My personality, my joy, my intuition, and my voice were never gone. They were buried under years of correction, survival, masking, and trying not to get in trouble for being fully alive. And now that they are rising back to the surface, I do not want to tuck them away into something more acceptable. I want to live bolder, louder, freer, in every possible direction.

I want to keep expanding my circle with people who can meet me in the deep end. I want to stop beating myself up over superficial friendships that went sideways when they never had the depth to be stable in the first place. I want to speak freely about the things I care about without apologizing first, softening the edges, or handing out little permission slips for my own existence.

And I want that for you too.

I want you to stop believing that being easier to tolerate is the same thing as being loved. I want you to stop confusing the version of you that survived with the version of you that is meant to live. I want you to stop mistaking quiet fear for peace, performed softness for healing, and self-abandonment for maturity. Your body knows the difference, even if your mind learned to explain it away.

Let them wander off in search of someone easier, smaller, quieter, flatter, more convenient, more willing to fold herself into a shape that fits inside their comfort zone. You do not have to follow. You do not have to chase. You do not have to explain one more time why you are allowed to be a whole person.

You get to trust your muchness.

In every possible way.

Your loudness. Your softness. Your politics. Your rage. Your tenderness. Your ambition. Your grief. Your strange little fascinations. Your hunger for beauty. Your need for depth. Your refusal to play nice with systems that stripped too much from you already. Your joy when it comes back with a vengeance and starts dancing barefoot through the kitchen.

Trust all of it.

And if that sounds a little like I am lovingly gaslighting you into believing in yourself, then good.

Because the world has spent long enough convincing women they imagined their own power.

I am simply here to help you imagine it back.