Congrats, You’re “Too Much” Again

There’s a kind of exhaustion that comes from thinking in layers while living in rooms that only reward sound bites. We’ve felt it: the moment you start editing before you even speak, shrinking a full thesis into something “easy,” not because you’re unclear, but because you can sense the space can’t hold you.

We get personal about where this shows up most, including faith deconstruction and the pressure to answer complex beliefs with a simple label. We talk about what happens when your inner world gets reduced to a category, and how that same flattening repeats in the workplace, negotiations, friendships, and family systems where nuance is treated like a problem. A key reframe lands hard: sometimes people aren’t confused by you, they’re protecting their comfort, and you’ve been paying the bill.

We also share practical ways to stop pre-editing: using discernment instead of defense, treating “I feel smaller here” as real data, and choosing relationships and rooms that sharpen you rather than silence you. If you care about communication, psychological safety, women in leadership, boundaries, and self-trust, this conversation gives language for what you’ve been carrying. Subscribe, share with a layered thinker you love, and leave a review with the moment that hit you most.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

There's something nobody tells you about being a woman who thinks in layers. They'll let you in the room. They just won't always have the infrastructure for what you bring into it. And at some point, maybe early, maybe after years of it, you start editing before you even open your mouth. You decide what's too much before anyone asks. You summarize when you actually have a full-blown thesis. You soften the edges because you learn that the unedited version of you creates friction. And the friction costs you something. It can cost you approval, it can cost you access, the perception of being easy to work with. So you dumb it down. You simplify, and you get really, really freaking good at it. But here's what that cost me that I had trouble naming. I started mistaking the room's capacity for my own ceiling. That's what this episode's about.

The Hidden Cost Of Editing

SPEAKER_00 1:02

So the most profound moment I can speak to this is when it came to honest to God, my faith. It was there was a period of life, a period of time in my life, goodness gracious, words are hard today, where I deconstructed my faith. And I started questioning a lot of the structures and the whys and the hows things were done inside of a church setting. And it wasn't because I like didn't necessarily trust, but I felt that things weren't as black and white as I felt like Christianity made it to be. And even in that, that's a complex answer for me as well. When someone's like, well, like what's your faith? And by default, and for ease and for palatability, it's easy to default and say, Oh, I'm a Christian.

Faith Deconstruction Without The Words

SPEAKER_00 2:03

And in theory, yes. Like, do I believe in Christ? Do I believe in Jesus? Do I believe that Jesus died for our sins? I do believe that. I do believe that. However, the context in which Christianity is usually associated with, I don't identify with. I don't identify with the perversion, I believe, of like scripture and text, and using it to ridicule someone or to spin it in a way that makes somebody feel less than. I just that I don't subscribe to that. So it's very, very difficult for me. So there's the specific feeling of having a thought for me that's fully formed, and then watching it land incomplete on the other side of like, oh, so you're just a Christian. Like that's not that it's wrong necessarily, but back then when I first was on my deconstructing journey, there wasn't language for what I was processing and what I was carrying. So when I reflect back to this, even as I still answer this question, there is this editing process that happens before I even can say it out loud. It's like this internal negotiation of how much of this is too much? How much, how do I make this digestible? And what do I leave out so that the other person can stay comfortable? And then I found even outside of the faith context, that this shows up for me in professional rooms as well. So the meetings, partnerships, negotiations, where I've learned to present the conclusion without the architecture or the framework that got me there, because the architecture and those frameworks, the things that built it, can make other people uncomfortable. For personal, so how this shows up for me personally in relationships, friendships, family, where thinking out loud gets labeled as like overthinking and nuance gets flattened into you're too sensitive, or why do you make things so complicated? And the exhaustion of living in that gap between how I actually think and what the world has shown me it can hold.

Work And Relationships That Flatten You

SPEAKER_00 4:49

They weren't struggling to understand you. They were struggling to stay comfortable while you were fully present. Those are completely different problems. And I've been on the other side of this as well, and so I'm totally guilty of that when it comes to getting someone to get to the point. But them getting to the point was to avoid my discomfort. And so I've had some really great opportunities to mirror that and see how it feels on the opposite side. But back to this: one is an intellectual gap, and the other is a capacity gap, right? And you've been handed someone else's capacity gap to solve at your own expense. So we tend to dumb it down or feel generalized, but that is not clarity for us. So what simplifying ultimately does, it doesn't make you clear, it makes you smaller, and smaller is easier for someone else to manage, easier for

Comfort Versus Capacity In Conversation

SPEAKER_00 5:50

someone else to categorize, or easier for someone not to be threatened by you. The difference between a room or a dynamic that challenges you to be sharper and a room that asks you to be less. One is gonna make you better and one's gonna make you quieter. So I've learned to also pay attention to that in relationship dynamics. So, in let's say a partnership, for instance, this is actually a really beautiful thing. Something that I get to experience is being in partnership with someone that makes you better. And it's not that it's always easy, but there's that scripture, getting back to faith, that talks about where iron sharpens iron. So the difference between being, let's say, in relationship, this is platonic or romantic, of course, but being in a relationship that challenges you to be sharper is going to continue to sharpen you by challenging you for making space. But then there's also going to be relationships and dynamics that are going to ask you to be less, that are going to ask you to be quieter because it makes them more comfortable. And that's not going to better you, right? So you do have the ability and have self-permission to be in the rooms that can still extract value from you, and you can pull it from them, but

Rooms That Sharpen Or Silence

SPEAKER_00 7:13

may not be able to hold you fully. But you cannot let those rooms define what you're capable of. And I think that's the distinction. The distinction also comes from an inner knowing of what you're fully capable of, and like really roots you in this self-love, self-discovery journey that is not like one and done. You are forever on that journey for the record, y'all. Now, a room that can't hold your full thinking, it isn't evidence of your excess or too muchness. It's honestly an evidence of your own limitation. Okay, so with all of that, I want to reframe for a second and kind of release some of these notions that we've got. So, what it looks like to stop editing preemptively, so before you enter that room, is not performing complexity for the sake of it, but also not shrinking to it before anyone even asked you to. No one asked you to be small. So stop. That's performance. There's a question I believe that's worth sitting in is where have you been simplifying yourself? Not because the room asked you to, but because you assumed that it couldn't hold you. Because that assumption has a cost too. And then also a why. Next, discernment over defense. This isn't about being in every room fully and loudly, it's about knowing which rooms deserve your full presence and which ones you're just moving through. You know those reels and those TikToks about like personality privileges when you're in like safe spaces with your friends.

Discernment, Data, And Self-Permission

SPEAKER_00 8:51

There's still discernment over that, too. Also, start noticing the difference between rooms where you were leaving feeling expanded and rooms where you leave feeling slightly less like yourself. That feeling is data. It has been data the entire time. So for my analytical girls, take that data, let's assess the data, and let's reframe and release that. And then finally, you don't have to explain or defend the way you think. You just have to find the conversations that have infrastructure for it and build the ones that don't yet. Stop retrofitting yourself to rooms that were never built for how you actually think, how I actually think. I mean, if you've spent years believing that the way you think is a problem and trying to categorize it into somebody else's version for them to be able to consume it or digest it, I want you to sit with this. And I'm gonna say this, holding your hand, girl. The room was too small, not you. The ask to simplify wasn't about you and your clarity, it was about someone else's comfort. And you've been paying that bill for long enough. I've been paying that bill for long enough. We think in layers because that's how we actually see things. That's not excess, that's precision that hasn't found its full conversation yet. And I'm glad you're here so we can have this conversation. Because that's exactly

Stop Retrofitting Yourself To Small Rooms

SPEAKER_00 10:32

what I mean.