Your fear of being “too much” is just internalised messaging from people who were too little for themselves.
There’s no such thing as too much light—only spaces not ready for its brightness.
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Now I’m like, do I really need antipsychotics? The resurgence of my muchness feels pretty good. Psychic and psychotic are only two letters different.
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theres so much muchness in every corner of the universe and i want to mirror it in my soul
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Okay, but I’m actually so scared to go back to school because what do you mean the people I thought I was chill with actually think I’m weird and too much and dont like me :( ! We should be a team, but our theatre class is so divided, I can’t handle it.
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The key is: how do we want to spend our time?
Okay so lately, the topic of boundaries has come up interestingly often, though not in the way I’m used to.
Usually, I think of boundaries as keeping out toxic people or intrusive requests. What’s come up lately is about creating space for better professional experiences. Which also means letting go of specific work in order to pursue more satisfying and rewarding work.
In one case the client/service provider relationship was a brutal mismatch. One of the parties was unpredictable, disrespectful of schedules, and undermined decisions already made even when those decisions were actively being implemented until finally…
One of the parties had enough and respectfully backed out of the relationship.
How do we want to spend our time?
Professionalism aside, if we’re going to pursue a career across years and decades, what do we want that experience to be? Because I won’t lie. Dysfunction abounds. Lack of communication skills, lack of social skills, lack of management skills is rampant.
Not every client is worth having.
Not every service provider is worth hiring.
What do you want.
Your experience to be?
Tied into knowing what you want is also knowing your worth. A lot of that’s your experience, your resume, of course. A lot of it’s the opinions of co-workers and past clients. A lot of it’s comparing your work with the work of your cohort. Not just the final product but also the client service, your communication skills, your social adeptness, your ability to manage your client toward a win-win.
From the other side of the counter, the hiring end, knowing what you want can be just as straight forward as knowing what you want. It can also be about comparing notes with your cohort, with people who’re in your shoes, with mentors. Because you’re not only looking for the right person or company to do the job, you’re looking for the right person or company to do the job.
What.
Do you want the experience to be?
And don’t settle for anything else.
It’s important to take a hard pass on dysfunctional working relationships because they’re so rampant in the work environment.
Now, the other conversations that come to mind that dance with boundaries are similar to my first example while being more preemptive. They all involve work that the professionals in question don’t want to do anymore. This isn’t about bailing in the middle of projects. It’s about no longer accepting projects from certain clients.
This is a complicated call to make, by the way. Especially early on when any paid job in our industry is the objective. Or especially when you’ve got something that’s got to get done. Definitely in the early going of my career I took everything. No questions asked. I kept working everything. And there was stuff in there that wasn’t healthy… but I overlooked it so I could keep having a job in my industry.
Whoops.
Because just as there’s such a consideration as quality of life, there’s also such a thing as quality of work life.
And it’s important to get that right because a poor quality of work life can be demoralizing. It degrades our best work and our best professional selves. And it can convince us we don’t want to do what we’ve been trying to do this whole time. Or that maybe we’re not good enough. Or maybe we just don’t belong.
There’s only so much of our lives we can dedicate to work, you see. And if 100% of it sucks then…
100% of it sucks. If 80 then 80. If 50 then 50. And so on.
The question is, how much of our careers do we allow to suck? How much negative experience do we allow to rob us of our Muchness? How much dysfunction do we allow to color our lives?
These are all personal calls, of course. I would only suggest that working in such circumstances is not sustainable. Like any other pressure that bears down on us, we can’t bear this pressure indefinitely. Because day after day that pressure transforms us into lesser versions of ourselves.
Lesser versions.
Of ourselves.
So.
The ball we’ve gotta keep our eye on is What kind of professional experience do I want to define my career?
Not joking, by the way. The job itself is not enough. If it were, then there wouldn’t have been any people in my first jobs who had to attend mandatory anger management classes. There wouldn’t have been any people who were habitually triggered into public displays of anger including shouting profanities, yelling at coworkers, throwing items from pens and pencils to furniture, and pouring gasoline over already existing dysfunctional work relationships.
What kind of professional experience do you want to define your career?
You achieve it by relentlessly seeking out and working jobs that are professionally fulfilling with people who bring out your best.
Which means letting go of jobs that are professionally debilitating. Getting them out of our lives as quickly as possible because the cost of not doing so is steep. They undermine our professional quality of life and eventually compromise our straight up quality of life.
Letting these jobs loose indefinitely in our careers is like tolerating cancer.
It does nothing, they do nothing but metastasize.
Now I said before the key is: how do we want to spend our time?
The answer to that question is absolutely defining. It addresses such a huge area of our lives that it demands an answer. And, with that answer in mind, we’re enabled to draw to ourselves the right experiences and throw away the wrong ones.
It’s not a simple task, mind you. I don’t want to give the wrong impression.
But it is the most important action we take on our own behalf to manifest careers that are not only fulfilling but also contribute to bringing about our best selves…
And our best lives.
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As another birthday celebrates another year of life (as I have no problem with ageing, it was a privilege denied to my brother), I now know this one new thing to be true…
During my entire 24 year relationship with Steve he tried to dim my muchness, saying that I was “too much”: too strong, too opinionated, too this, too that, too the other, whatever… the list was frankly endless. And for too long I made myself much less to make him feel much better.
But after all these years apart and free, I have come to realise how those who have ever considered me “too much”, were in themselves not enough, and my muchness made their insecurities squirm.
How do I know this? Because I have now found those who revel in my muchness and quite enjoy me being me - muchness and all - which equals a lot of fun, laughter, growth and, well… shenanigans. 😏
So, please live your best life with your best, true, whole self, and let the Impure Insecure fall away like rotting fruit, because your true tribe is waiting for space to be made, so they can arrive in your life and have somewhere to stay.
Don’t be afraid to swap out the meh for the magnificent, and be as much as you damn well please!
Here’s to year 52… let’s do this! 💃 🎉
Too Relieved To Grieve memoir: https://amzn.to/2Y4sC0s (link in bio)
#memoir #toomuchness #muchness #findyourtribe #tribe #divorce #breakup #heartbreak #heartbroken #divorcecoaching #breakupcoaching #toorelievedtogrieve #karanscott #thealternativeheartbreakhandbook #karanscottauthor #authorsofinstagram #authorlife #authormemoir #newbookstagram #newbookstagrammer #newbookstoread #whattoreadnext #birthday #birthdaycelebration #hereistolife #dontdimyourshine
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Where do all us broken hearts go?
We gather in masses of lonely people
We bleed and we bleed and we bleed,
Only to dry up in what once was
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missing you // night traveler
i feel like im missing something or someone i dont know about, but the feeling is familiar—at the same time irrational yet intense—almost as if i came from a past life and it’s my damn mission to find out who or what this void and home and muchness is all about
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ps. i love the night traveler, this track i consider one of my ‘homies’. the original was a whole lot better but witnessing this song being celebrated live just compares to nothing—well, perhaps nostalgia
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