You walk into your job interview, shake hands with your interviewers, and make small talk; you even laugh with them and make jokes. The interview begins and you are well-prepared. You are strong. You are confident. You answer all the questions thoughtfully and thoroughly. However, you can sense that one of the interviewers is unimpressed, and you don’t know why. Upon exiting your interview, you suddenly feel incredibly insecure — you replay every moment and every word, but you still can’t figure it out. You ask yourself, did I smile too much? Laugh too much? Speak too much?… Was I too much?
You’ve started to see someone for about two months now. You feel good about this one; finally, someone you can connect with. Then out of the blue, they’re laughing with you, and the words slip. They say to you, “you’re too much!” Hey, maybe it was simply a joke about how funny you are, but you sit there in discomfort and wonder, do I do too much? Do I care too much? Do I love too much? Am I too much? Do I love so hard that I’m too hard to love?
The story doesn’t end here. One day, I decide to meet up with someone I met on a dating app. He says to me, “You’re welcome to stay as long as you can tolerate me.” Perhaps this comment is just nothing, it’s harmless. To me, it implies that someone in his life is making him feel like he is too much… too much to be around — and that’s absolutely heartbreaking.
We walk through our lives constantly feeling like we are not enough. The age of social media makes us feel like we aren’t qualified enough, experienced enough, attractive enough, healthy enough, or fit enough. Everything around us tells us, whether directly or indirectly, that we are not enough.
Yet simultaneously, we feel like we are too much. Too much of all the wrong things and not enough of all the right things.
We are too attractive. Too smart. Too opinionated. Too passionate. Too caring. Too loving. Too funny. Too much like a woman. Too much like a man. We are just simply too much.
Here’s the truth:
We are told we are too much because we take up space. We are compelling. We are charismatic. We command the room with the intensity of our magical aura. My high school music teacher would encourage us to claim our stage. He’d tell us to command the stage — walk up and down it, jump around, stand out. He said, “If you don’t claim your stage, someone else will.” Perhaps this exercise was purely for the sake of music; however, the lesson I took away as an adult has been instrumental (for lack of a better word).
Being called “too much” is a scare tactic employed by those who fear your power. They fear how much space you claim. Calling us “too much” is a way to scare us into taking up less space and suppress our internal power so that they can feel larger.
The moral of the story:
The universe has no limit for the amount of space that you can claim.