I clearly have friends who, like me, struggle to sleep. The other day I received a WhatsApp in the early hours from a mate with a business idea. To his credit, he opened with ‘Wild and crazy 3 am thought’. Whilst not this mate, I have had a few others text me long screeds about their current life difficulties, which most definitely fall into the ‘oversharing’ category when they arrive out of the blue without any buildup.
I know I’ve been very occasionally guilty - sending something long and heartfelt, or a little too excited, or a bit raw at eleven o’clock at night. Then I almost immediately check myself and send a follow-up ‘hey, sorry, that was a lot’ before the recipient has had a chance to read, let alone respond. It’s because I was being all too much - wrong time, wrong person, wrong message.
I’ve also had it said to my face. In my early teens, at a gathering at the sailing club in Darwin, a girl exclaimed, “You think you’re such hot shit.” I can’t recall what prompted it, but I wrote recently that she was right:
“Sometimes I feel angry, not with others, but with myself. It’s always easy to second-guess after the fact, but I look back especially at personal relationships and friendships and realise I was often rubbish at being an authentic human to those around me. All too often I presented inauthentically, and people rightly called me out. My inauthenticity led to an ego that told me I must be right, and others were wrong - even when patently I was not right.”
I came across a piece on Elephant Journal from a while back by Kate Rose; it was the gloriously unsubtle title You Don’t Need A Man, You Need a Goddamn Warrior. It’s written to women and full of wild hearts and warriors, and it wasn’t what I expected based on the title.
“You are one of the wild ones, and no matter how you tried to hide that fact, you can’t be anything other than what you are—and that’s okay. You are just as you are supposed to be, magnificently wild in all of your chaotic beauty.”
Under the warrior language, its real promise has nothing to do with gender: someone out there will love you because of your intensity rather than in spite of it, and you won’t have to turn yourself down to be kept. She also writes this great line:
“Don’t try to run this time”
Kate’s aim is true. Plenty of lonely people, men and women alike, have learned that their feelings arrive at a volume others find hard to take, and they tend to deal with it in one of two ways. Some shrink, editing every message and keeping their enthusiasm on a short leash, while others leave a friendship or a relationship at the first sign of cooling, before the other person gets the chance to leave them.
‘Running’ has a name in psychology. Geraldine Downey, a psychologist at Columbia University, spent years studying what she called ‘rejection sensitivity’: the habit of anxiously expecting to be turned away and then seeing the signs everywhere. In a conference abstract written with Rainer Romero, she described the trap:
“people who anxiously expect rejection behave in ways that lead to the realization of their worst fears”
So the person who leaves first to spare themselves the hurt often ends up with exactly the loneliness they were trying to avoid, and then treats it as proof they were right to go.
Shrinking costs something too, just more quietly. Sanjay Srivastava and his colleagues followed 278 first-year university students through their first term and found that the ones who masked their emotions had a harder time forming close relationships:
“Hiding your emotions is something that is very common but it’s something that often is not the right thing to do.”
I’d like to think I’ve never made someone else feel they were too much, but I know better than to assume it. I’ve written before about the quiet exhaustion of keeping parts of yourself hidden, the small, constant editing we do because we think it makes us easier to accept, and being told you’re too much is often where that editing starts.
Sometimes “too much” is fair feedback, because intensity can arrive at the wrong moment, and a friend who says, “Can we talk about this tomorrow?” is usually just tired. The better question is whether you were too much for anyone or simply too much for that person on that day, and most of us skip straight to the first answer.
So here’s one small thing to try. Next time you feel the urge to send the “sorry, that was a lot” text, or to pull away before they can pull away from you, hold off for a day and let them respond to what you actually said. Some people won’t, and that tells you about the fit between you, not your worth. Others will write back with something just as long.