Photo by Onur Can Elma on Unsplash
You've been told you're too much your entire life. Too sensitive, too intense, too loud, too quiet, too literal, too emotional, too rigid. The label changes depending on the context, but the message underneath stays the same: the way you naturally are is a problem that other people have to deal with.
So you learned to be less. Less of whatever was bothering them today. You dampened, edited, suppressed. You built a version of yourself that took up the right amount of space - not too much, not too little - and you got so good at maintaining it that you almost forgot there was anything underneath.
Almost. Because the exhaustion never quite goes away. And every so often, usually at the worst possible moment, the real version slips through and someone looks at you the way they always used to, and you remember: you're still too much. You just got better at hiding it.
Here's what nobody told you when you were seven, or twelve, or twenty-five: "too much" was never a description of you. It was a description of their capacity.
You weren't too sensitive. They didn't know what to do with your sensitivity. You weren't too intense. Your intensity made them uncomfortable. You weren't too rigid. Your need for structure didn't fit their flexibility. You weren't too literal. They relied on subtext that wasn't available to you, and it was easier to call you difficult than to say what they meant.
Every time someone called you "too much," they were telling you about their limits, not yours. But when you're a child, you can't make that distinction. A child whose parent says "you're too much" doesn't think: "My parent has limited emotional bandwidth." They think: "I need to be less."
And so the project begins. The lifelong, exhausting project of being less than you are in order to be acceptable.
The adapted self is impressive, in a grim sort of way. You learned which parts of yourself were welcome and which needed hiding. You learned to monitor in real time - adjusting your volume, your expression, your needs, your responses - based on constant surveillance of other people's comfort levels.
Some of you became invisible. Quiet, agreeable, easy. The kind of person nobody worries about because you never give them reason to. The cost: nobody sees you either. You've traded authenticity for acceptability, and the loneliness of being permanently unseen is harder to name than the pain of being rejected.
Some of you went the other direction. Loud, performing, filling the room with energy so nobody looks too closely at what's underneath. The class clown, the life of the party, the one who makes everyone else comfortable by being relentlessly entertaining. The cost: you're exhausted, and the version of you people love is the least real version.
Some of you oscillated between both, never quite sure which strategy was appropriate, getting it wrong often enough to confirm that you are, indeed, too much.
All of you learned the same lesson: who you actually are is not safe to be.
For some people, learning they're neurodivergent happens in childhood. For many, it doesn't come until adulthood - often accidentally, through a social media post or a friend's diagnosis or a child's assessment that triggers recognition.
The moment of identification is complicated. There's relief, sometimes enormous relief, because the story suddenly makes sense. The thing that was wrong with you has a name, and the name isn't "lazy" or "weird" or "difficult." It's a different kind of brain, operating by different rules, in a world designed for a different kind of brain.
But there's grief too. For the years spent thinking you were broken. For the energy wasted trying to fix something that was never a malfunction. For the relationships damaged by the mismatch between who you are and who you were trying to be. For the child who needed understanding and got correction instead.
And underneath the grief, often, rage. At the teachers who punished you for not paying attention instead of asking why. At the parents who told you to try harder instead of trying differently. At a culture that treated your neurology as a character flaw and your distress as drama.
The rage is legitimate. And it usually needs somewhere to go before anything else can happen.
Understanding that you're neurodivergent doesn't automatically undo the shame. You can know, intellectually, that your brain works differently and still feel, viscerally, that you're doing everything wrong.
Because the shame wasn't installed by a diagnosis. It was installed by thousands of small moments of being told - explicitly or implicitly - that the way you are is unacceptable. Those moments built a structure, and the structure doesn't dissolve because you've learned a new word for it.
The shame shows up as: apologising for existing. Over-explaining every decision. Pre-emptively excusing your needs before anyone can object. Dismissing your own distress because you've learned your distress bothers people. Performing competence at enormous personal cost because the alternative - admitting you're struggling - feels like confirming everything they ever said about you.
This is the work that strategies and accommodations can't do. External adjustments help - reducing demands, removing unnecessary masking, creating environments that work for your brain. But the internal critic, the one that sounds like every disappointed teacher and exasperated parent you ever had, needs something different.
The work of therapy for neurodivergent people isn't about learning to cope better. It's about figuring out who you actually are underneath decades of adaptation.
This is harder than it sounds. When you've been performing for most of your life, the performance becomes structural. You don't know which of your preferences are genuine and which are borrowed. You don't know if you hate parties or if you hate the person you have to become at parties. You don't know if you're introverted or if you're exhausted. You don't know if you're anxious or if you're responding normally to a world that was never designed for you.
Separating what's yours from what was imposed takes time. It means experimenting with what happens when you stop adapting in certain contexts - and sitting with the discomfort when people respond to the unmasked version differently than they responded to the performance.
Some people will prefer the mask. That's their limitation, not your failure. But some people - the ones who matter - will prefer the real thing. The unfiltered, imperfect, "too much" version of you that's been waiting, probably for a very long time, to find out what happens when you stop apologising for it.
You were never too much. You were just in rooms that were too small.
