“Why Do I Always Feel Like I’m Too Much—Or Not Enough?”
“I never seem to land in the right place with people. I’m either too emotional, too intense, too sensitive—or I’m distant, detached, not warm enough, not interesting enough. It feels like no matter how I show up, I’m somehow wrong. I can’t figure out how to just be me without feeling like I’m failing the moment.”
Dear Antonio,
Reading your words, I felt that familiar ache settle in. The ache of always trying to calibrate yourself in a world that never quite confirms you’re okay as you are. Of looking around and wondering how everyone else seems to know how to belong, how to speak the right amount, feel the right amount, need the right amount. While you, inside your own skin, are constantly scanning—Was that too much? Not enough? Did I say it wrong? Should I have stayed quiet? Did I disappear again without meaning to?
That question you asked—Why do I always feel like I’m too much or not enough?—is the emotional heartbeat of so many people I’ve known, worked with, and cared for. And it almost always comes from the same place: a wound that formed long before we had the language to name it. It’s a wound that grows in homes where the child had to over-function or under-function to stay safe. Where love felt conditional. Where the emotional weather was unpredictable. Where someone’s approval, or mood, or attention dictated whether you got to exist freely—or whether you needed to shrink, soften, vanish.
In those spaces, your sense of self doesn’t get to develop with trust. It develops with vigilance.
You learn how to read a room before you learn how to name your needs. You learn how to shape-shift into what’s acceptable, digestible, non-threatening. You become excellent at managing impressions—at being what other people want you to be—but often lose the sense of who you are when no one is watching.
And that’s where the fragmentation begins.
“Too much” becomes the label for every moment you express emotion in its fullness—grief, excitement, need, fear, joy—and someone flinches, withdraws, minimizes, or tells you to tone it down. “Not enough” becomes the ghost that follows you when you pull back, when you don’t entertain, when you go quiet or need space or fall into stillness, and someone sees your distance as lack, as failure, as disconnection.
It’s a loop. A trap. A system that makes you feel like you’re constantly managing yourself out of fear of disapproval. You keep trying to get it right, to hit the middle, to finally be enough, whatever that means—but the target keeps moving.
And that’s not your fault.
It’s the residue of environments—family systems, peer dynamics, even early romantic relationships—where your worth wasn’t met with consistency. Where affection came with conditions. Where being “yourself” didn’t feel safe.
So now, even as an adult, you’re caught in the pattern of questioning every move, every expression, every moment of realness. Because somewhere along the way, your body learned that being fully you could mean losing connection. And for a nervous system wired for attachment, that’s the ultimate threat.
But let me say this clearly: You were never too much. And you were never not enough. What you were was not met. Not mirrored. Not made safe.
And that absence? That’s what taught you to split yourself into acceptable pieces. To water yourself down when you felt big. To inflate yourself when you felt small. To become someone else’s version of palatable.
The pain of that runs deep. It creates a kind of identity insecurity that doesn’t just show up in relationships—it follows you everywhere. Into your work. Your friendships. Your inner monologue. You start to second-guess your preferences, your pace, your voice, even your silence. You become a performance, not a person. And it’s exhausting.
The first step out of that loop isn’t to correct yourself. It’s to notice the loop in the first place. To realize that this too-much/not-enough narrative isn’t the truth—it’s a trauma echo. It’s a leftover story from a time when you weren’t given the full, sacred permission to exist in your wholeness.
And from there, gently, you start practicing something radical: self-reference.
You begin asking yourself how you feel—not how others might perceive you. You begin letting your emotions rise and fall without assigning them moral weight. You begin reclaiming your full range. Not because it will always be met by others, but because it belongs to you.
This work is slow. Tender. Uneven. Some days you’ll feel brave enough to be all of yourself in a room. Other days, you’ll retreat, wondering if you ruined it again. But each time you catch yourself in the loop, and name it for what it is—a relic, not a reality—you weaken its hold.
Eventually, you learn to trust that you are allowed to be a full person. With needs. With edges. With softness. With contradictions. With moments where you shine too brightly for some and go too quiet for others. And none of that disqualifies you from love.
The people who need you to shrink were never offering real love in the first place. The people who make you feel “not enough” are often speaking from their own unhealed places.
And the only person who can interrupt this cycle—the only one who can stop demanding perfection—is you. Not in the form of a grand gesture. But in the small moments when you say: This is who I am right now. It’s not too much. It’s not too little. It’s simply me.
That’s not indulgence. That’s healing.
And it’s allowed to take time.
With you, fully.
–RJ