Too Much For Every Room I Have Been In

She was nine the first time and it was a teacher who said it, and the teacher was not being unkind.

Just a bit much, that one. Said over her head to another adult in a corridor, in the tone people use for a dog that jumps up. And she heard it, the way children hear everything they were not supposed to.

Since then: too much for a classroom, too much for a boyfriend at twenty two who said it more carefully than the teacher had, too much for a small group where a leader once asked her, in a kind voice, whether she could leave more space.

And so there is a thing she does now, and she has done it for so long that she does it before she has decided to. Somewhere between the thought arriving and her mouth opening, she takes about twenty percent off. Volume, length, warmth. She calls it, privately, the trim.

Forty one years old. She has never once been in a room where she did not do the trim first.

You know that. Maybe you are quiet rather than loud and the word used about you was different. But somewhere there is a factory setting you have been apologizing for since you were a child.

Say what the trim costs

Nobody has counted it, and it is more than people think.

It costs her about twenty percent of every sentence she has said since she was nine, which over thirty two years is a quantity of self that has simply never been in a room.

It cost her the small group, in the end, not because she was asked to leave but because attending a room that has asked for less of a person becomes exhausting in a way that has no name.

And it costs her the thing that comes after the trim, which is the checking: three or four seconds after speaking, every time, running an assessment on how it landed, which means she is never fully in a conversation because part of her is always about four seconds behind it, auditing.

You have been trimming twenty percent off yourself since you were nine, and God has never once asked for less of you. Psalm 139:16 says His book had your substance written when there was none of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes substance off a page and puts it in a church hall on a Tuesday. The specification was set before a teacher had an opinion in a corridor.

Fearfully and wonderfully made, and who did the making

There is one line built for a woman who has been taking twenty percent off.

I will praise you; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are your works; and that my soul knows right well.Psalm 139:14

Do not let that verse become a poster, because a poster is what has ruined it. Read what it is actually claiming. The subject of the making is God, the object is a specific person, and the response is praise rather than acceptance.

And notice the last clause, which almost nobody quotes: my soul knows right well. That is a statement about certainty in the deepest part of a person, and it is exactly the part of her that has been overruled since she was nine, and His Spirit is the one who can restore a certainty that a corridor took away.

You were made at this size deliberately, and the making was His work rather than an accident He has been tolerating. That is not a way of telling somebody they are perfect as they are. The written word makes God the maker and the works marvelous, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a place a teacher's sentence has been sitting in for thirty two years.

And I want to be careful, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Nothing here tells you that not fitting rooms is your identity, and I am not going to make being too much into a badge. And nothing here promises you that the people who asked for less will come round and ask for more.

What this does not do

It does not stop somebody asking you for space. Somebody probably will, this year, and possibly kindly, and this article does not give you an answer for that moment.

What can change is what the trim is protecting. At the moment it is protecting a nine year old from a sentence in a corridor. She is forty one and the sentence has been repeated by four people in thirty two years, and the trim has been running continuously in a way that no actual amount of criticism could justify.

You have a volume that was set by the one who made you, and it does not need defending in every room. Psalm 139:14 makes the making His, and the same Spirit is the one who turns a written line into ground under a woman who is about to speak.

One plain sentence before we go on. If being too much has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not weakness. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.