You Are Not Too Much — You’re Just Not Meant for Everyone
A reflection on complexity, self-erasure, and the sacred resonance of the 1% who gets you. For as long as I can remember, I believed I was too much. Too layered. Too deep. Too sensitive. Too complex.
I took personality tests — over and over — half-hoping they would offer me something lighter. Simpler. Lovable in a way that didn’t require translation. But they never did.
I was always the one with the thickest manual.
The one who couldn’t be summed up in a few clean sentences. The one who held contradictions: unguarded, yet impenetrable.
And somewhere, deep in the folds of my subconscious, a quiet voice had already begun to narrate the story:
“You are too much. 99% of people will never understand you. You are a library in a world that only wants headlines.”
So I began the slow, painful art of shrinking. Not my thoughts. My identity.
I tried to become the thin book. The breezy read.
The one someone could finish in a single sitting and say, “Ah, that makes sense.” The one that brought joy and lightness — not the bittersweet. Not the ache. Not the slow, soul-deep truths that take time to digest.
I thought if I could be easier to read, I might be easier to love. If I could soften my depth, someone might stay longer. If I could make myself light enough, no one would have to carry anything after closing the cover.
But every time I erased a paragraph, smoothed a sentence, skipped a chapter of my truth — I lost a little more of myself. And then the question arrived — like something ancient rising up from the body:
Is the 1% enough? If 99% of the world will never quite choose me, never quite get me — would the 1% who do… be enough to carry me home?
I’ve been sitting with that question. Especially after finishing Thanks for the Feedback by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen.
They speak of the baseline — your emotional default, your personal temperature — the self you return to when the world tries to define you.
And I realized: My baseline is complexity. It’s not a flaw. It’s a foundation.
But I’d spent years trying to rewrite it. Trying to sound like a simpler version of myself. Trying to become more palatable — and in doing so, forgetting how to be recognizable to myself.
Because that’s what scarcity does. It whispers:
“If only you were easier to love…”
“If only you didn’t ask for so much…”
“Then maybe you’d belong.”
So I listened. I over-apologized. I softened my edges until they disappeared. I translated my emotions into something others could digest — even when it made me disappear from my own story. And still… still I waited to be seen. Until I understood this:
It’s not about being chosen by everyone.
It’s about being understood by those who’ve met themselves first. Because the 1% — they don’t just read you. They slow down to feel you. They bring a pen. They write in the margins. They don’t scan you. They sit with you. And in your presence, they rewrite something inside themselves. Here is the quiet truth I carry now:
We ask to be understood by others when what we truly crave is our own recognition.
And for most of my life, I was offering people the outline, then wondering why they didn’t feel the depth. I thought I needed to simplify. But what I really needed was to come home to the pages I kept skipping. To read my own story — slowly, without shame, without erasure. Now, I no longer seek mass comprehension. I seek resonance.
I seek the few who speak the same frequency. The ones who’ve done their own descent and know how to hold complexity with kindness. And I’ve stopped trying to be the thin book. Because the people who are meant for me? They don’t rush the ending. They don’t fear the pages I haven’t explained yet. They simply say —
“Me too.”
#SelfRecognition #SubconsciousHealing #EmotionalResonance #AuthenticityOverApproval #ComplexityIsAFormOfGrace #SelfAcceptance #GrowthAndHealing #YouAreNotTooMuch #HighlySensitiveSoul #CreativeIntuition
