I’m Too Much … Are You? Turning Our Force into Power

See if this rings a bell. You’re sitting in a restaurant in your very best Sunday dress – maybe the navy velvet one with the scratchy lace collar that all of your eight-year-old friends covet. You are excited to be in this French restaurant on a Sunday night with your family, and eagerly anticipating the chocolate mousse that will arrive if you eat your vegetables. You’re having a lovely time when suddenly your older sister leans in perilously closely. “Would you please stop yelling?” she snarls.

Yelling? You weren’t yelling. Merely talking non-stop in a loud, persistent voice, and trying like hell to be penetrate the fog of the martini-laced adults at the table.

Or maybe this seems familiar. You find yourself running, nonstop, all the time, up and down hills, in and out of houses, up and down grocery aisles. Mainly you do this because it’s fun. You love running around. Life has zing! It’s meant to be leapt into and you know this, even though you are only three or four. The parents around you, however, aren’t having it. Would you stop running For Lord’s Sweet Sake, one of them thunders at you.

You walk away confused.

That little girl was me, of course, I have that big, zestful, oversize personality to this day, though I have learned to slow down a bit and even speak more quietly in restaurants. What that’s taken is mostly public rebuke. The woman on the crowded train in my thirties who approached me and said, “We’re all listening to your conversation, dear, word for word.” Or the choir director who in more recent years kept telling me to ‘keep it down’.

What I take away from all of this is that when you have a big energy, you must make modifications, yes. But you also must learn to nurture your gold – your fire, as my guest this week, Aurora Remember, likes to put it. This involves making choices that suit your best interest.

For me, this has been a gradual process of moving from shame about my big energy to gradual acceptance, and now, later in life, to out and out celebration. Turns out there really is gold in them hills. Because I now understand this big energy is what has powered me through considerable success as an entrepreneur. It’s what informs my voice as a writer. It’s a fundamental part of my creative output.

Without it, I simply wouldn’t get that much done. Nor would it have my unique, slightly too big stamp on all that I create.

I wouldn’t have the visions I have, for … say … a podcast about self-care. And I wouldn’t have the guts to write all those books about joy, or my series of novels. I wouldn’t have the nerve to speak on stage – and I certainly wouldn’t have recovered to the extent that I have since my daughter Teal’s death several years ago. I wouldn’t know my place in the world and why it matters.

I can remember a telling moment some years ago in a therapist’s office. Suddenly, it struck me that the reason I was so oversized – and yes, I am nearly six feet tall as well – is that I’m meant to stick out. I’m meant to be a front of the room leader, with a distinctive, attention-getting voice and manner. I’m meant to wave a flag and make a difference.

The culprit when we quietly die on the vine is usually shame – a fundamental dislike of who we are and what we share with the world. That definitely stopped me cold when I was younger. Back in my twenties, I struggled to finish my first novel. Pushing with all the might I had, I finally did squeak out a first, tortured book which got me a literary agent, but little more.

Over time, things improved. I got up and wobbily performed original songs in some of New York’s cabarets – and people laughed and applauded and I built a following. I found a publisher for a novel, finally, and then a self-help book. I took my one woman show on the road in my forties, and found both bitter and kind reviews on tour.  More books followed, and speaking gigs as well.

And over time, I began to realize, the ‘issue’ wasn’t my big personality. It was whether I would show up, make myself known, and take whatever heat came my way. Eventually, it all became too much fun to stop – and so I continue generating content to this day. The fear of public shaming is no longer even that relevant.

People like what they like, and they diss what they diss, and so life goes on. It is not our job to understand or meddle or even manipulate and cajole. It is simply our job to put ourselves out there, with, glee and yes, appropriate indoor voices. And to move towards the light that embraces us and celebrates the unique and stirring magic that we are.

May you, too, love your bigness.

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