Too big.

Too bright.

Too intense.

If you’ve ever been made to feel that you need to dull down your brightness, your beauty.

To dumb down your words.

To fit into a box that is much too small for the magnificence of your being.

That somehow, by being the person that you are, you believe that you’ll snatch that opportunity away from everyone else.

If you have allowed those messages to catch you up, take your breath away, and teach you how to relate to the world by shrinking and hiding from the full breadth of the amazing, deep, creative and gorgeous person that you are…

This post is for you.

There was a time in my life when I stood shoulders hunched, knees bound together, sweating over the work that it was requiring to keep myself as small as possible.

The implication here was dual-fold: keeping the expanse of my beautiful body as small as possible in a perpetual apology for my size and keeping my thoughts, passion, and liveliness as quiet and stunted as I could in an attempt to not intimidate.

I had learned that I was too much , too big, too expressive. I apologized for my quickness of speech, the way that I hopped up out of my seat when I was really turned on about something. I apologized for my grades, lying about or hiding my successes.

I told myself that what I was doing was polite.

I told myself that “nice women” make space for others to feel good about themselves, even if it comes as the expense of denying our own inherent goodness.

I told myself that it was arrogant to talk about my skills, my gifts, or to discuss money – period.

I told myself that no one would give a shit about anything good about me, until I lost weight, had cash, had a partner, ________.
I used those obstacles to deny myself entry to the life that I desperately wanted for myself.

I was lying my ass off.

Here’s the thing – we are born to sparkle. We are born to live lives that are firmly entrenched in the beauty that lights us up and makes us tick.

We are meant to — USE our gifts.

And yet, for so many of us – the “too much” – we are living lives bound by our own complex set of rules. The rules that we designed to dictate how we fit in, how we keep others around, how we dim our own lights to sweetly make space for others to shine.

This post is a humble request to encourage you to step squarely into your own brilliance, as I step into mine in front of you.

You do not have to apologize for the full magnitude of the person that you are.

For having too many interests.

For being too passionate.

For your strange parts or secret parts or underutilized parts.

This post is a love note to the women who were told that good women just don’t behave that way.

It is a love note to you as much as myself.

It is a public invitation to reclaim your life.

How many moments have you let others take what you wanted, because you knew you could have another idea and well, they really wanted it, so…?

How many times have you kept my mouth shut when your heart was beating a million beats a moment and your inner light was tripping over herself she was so ecstatic about what you were doing?

How many times have you told myself – it’s already been done?

How have you made excuses, played pretend, or minimized the significance of what you wanted, so as to mitigate the future pain of not succeeding?

This is a post about stepping into your life, utterly and completely.

And yet, it is not a post about perfection. It is about accepting yourself fully, and yes, that does mean loving up your least shiny parts. It means buddying up next to your inner critic and striking up a compassionate conversation.

It means saying to yourself, it may not always be pretty, but at least it’s all mine.

It means taking responsibility for your muchness, and celebrating the entirety of your spirit.

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