I Wasn't Asking for Too Much

 

"I didn't wake up one day believing I was too much. I was taught."

I spent a long time believing I was “too much.”

Too emotional.

Too sensitive.

Too intense.

Too needy.

Too opinionated.

Too something.

It was wild how often that conclusion came up, considering the actual things I was asking for were… basic human decency. Safety. Communication. Consistency. Not being bulldozed when I said no. Radical, I know.

Somehow, wanting to feel okay in my own life got translated into being dramatic.

So I did what a lot of us do. I adjusted. I softened my asks. I learned how to preface my needs with apologies. I learned how to laugh things off. I learned how to say “it’s fine” while my nervous system was actively on fire.

Spoiler alert: it did not work.

Because the problem was never that I wanted too much.

The problem was that I was asking people who benefited from giving me less.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

I wasn’t “hard to love.”

I was just inconvenient to people who didn’t want to show up fully.

I wasn’t “too emotional.”

I was emotionally aware in rooms that preferred avoidance.

I wasn’t “asking for too much.”

I was asking the wrong people.

Here’s the thing no one tells you: when you start healing, when you get sober, when you build a life with intention, when you stop dissociating your way through discomfort... your standards naturally go up. Not because you’re being difficult, but because you can finally feel when something is off.

That makes some people real uncomfortable.

Last night, I sat in a space I built myself. My own room. My own rules. Safety first, always. No spiritual bypassing, no dogpiling, no performative hierarchy. Just real people, real thoughts, real autonomy.

The meeting was supposed to be an hour.

It went two.

The ones who stayed? Free thinkers. Sharp minds. Big hearts. People who have been burned by systems that punish honesty and curiosity. One of them had just gone through brutal attacks for speaking up - the same kind I went through when I first realized I needed to create something different.

We traded numbers. We laughed. We validated each other without fixing each other. No one asked anyone to shrink. No one demanded silence. No one called anyone “too much.”

And it hit me, crystal clear:

I have never been too much in the right room.

I don’t need to want less.

I don’t need to explain better.

I don’t need to contort myself into something easier to tolerate.

I need alignment.

I need safety.

I need spaces, and people, who don’t require self erasure as the price of admission.

So no, I wasn’t asking for too much.

I was asking for what I deserved, long before I fully believed that.

And I’m not apologizing for that anymore.

And maybe this is the part no one talks about, the moment after the breaking - when nothing is fixed yet, but something inside you goes quiet instead of loud. 

When you stop begging to be understood by people who benefit from misunderstanding you. 

I don’t have a neat conclusion here. 

I’m still in the middle of it. 

But I do know this: the life I built wasn’t imaginary, and neither was the harm done to it.

The next piece of this story isn’t about loss, it’s about what happens when you stop shrinking to survive. That’s where I’m headed next.