Reframe 3: What If Everything You Call "Too Much" Is Actually What You Needed to Survive?

The Blue Costume

I was 13, in a blue Caterpillar costume. Eight lines. Blue face paint.

I don't remember how it felt to wear it.

That's the thing that stays with me. Not the costume. Not the lines. Not the applause.

The fact that I was so gone, so somewhere else, that even now—decades later—I can't feel my own body in that moment.

I wanted to be Alice.

The Pattern I Started Seeing

Years later—career built, rooms decoded, my voice carrying—I kept hearing the same disappearance.

"I talked too much." "I overshared." "I interrupted." "I lost it." "I'm mortified."

Shame slams the door. Verdict: too much.

Beneath it, a quieter question: Why? What was I trying to do?

They didn't know. I hadn't either, for most of my life.

When I Started Understanding Myself

It took understanding my neurology. It took finally seeing: Oh. I'm not broken. I'm just operating on a different system. What worked for the predominant neotype did not work for me, and what did not work for me...

When I slow down, I can feel it:

The way my brain moves fast and needs external processing to land thoughts.

The way I talk to think.

The way a room's emotional temperature affects my nervous system.

The way I care so much that I feel everything.

These aren't flaws. They're just… how I'm built.

But here's what changed everything:

When I stopped trying to hide it and started understanding what was actually happening, I could finally be strategic about it.

Instead of shame: I talk too much because I'm processing externally and I'm excited/nervous/managing the room's temperature.

Instead of hiding: Now I know why. So I can choose.

The Gap Between Knowing and Being Known

The real moment came when I realized something brutal:

Some people will never understand you.

Not because you're not explaining clearly enough.

Not because you need to try harder.

But because they don't want to understand you.

And I'd spent so much energy trying to make them.

I'd contorted myself.

Slowed my speech.

Softened my ideas.

Managed my presence.

All so that people who had no genuine curiosity about how I actually worked could feel comfortable.

The irony was: the people who actually needed me—my speed, my ability to see patterns fast—disappeared when I contracted. They didn't recognize me. Because I was performing for the people who would never get it anyway.

I was visible to everyone except the ones I was trying to reach.

What I Stopped Doing

I stopped explaining myself to people who weren't asking.

I stopped softening my speed so people could keep up at their pace.

I stopped managing rooms full of people who were uncomfortable with clarity.

I stopped apologizing for how my brain works.

I stopped waiting for understanding from people who'd already decided I was "too much."

What Actually Started Happening

When I stopped performing the acceptable version, different people showed up.

Not everyone. But the ones who mattered.

The leaders who wanted to move fast and think deeply at the same time. The people who valued clarity over comfort. The ones who didn't need me to disappear to feel okay.

And something shifted in me. The frantic energy—the desperate scrambling to be understood—that dissolved.

Not because I changed. But because I stopped wasting power on people and systems that were never going to meet me there.

Back to the Caterpillar

I was in a blue costume, wanting to be someone else, and I don't remember being in my body.

Forty years later, I'm still figuring out what it means to actually inhabit myself.

But I know this now: the intensity, the speed, the way I process, the way I care—these aren't things to apologize for or hide or manage down into acceptability.

They're just data. Information about how I'm wired. Information about what I need. Information about who I'm actually here to work with.

The question isn't: How do I stop being too much?

The question is: What do I do now that I finally understand why I am the way I am?

This is Reframe 3 of 9. Read Reframe 1 here and Reframe 2 here. Want more? Subscribe here.