Being Too Much: What drilled-in voices am I fighting?
For those of us who choose to transgress
Writing entries for this publication, or others, for conferences, or for my Ph.D. is a process that’s totally fun. I love writing. Sometimes, I have voices I try to shake off. They tell me I’m being too much. Sometimes I manage to shake them off, and sometimes I don’t and end up deleting a sentence I typed out.
Writing with confidence for me means first, knowing where you’re at and how much of your honest thoughts you choose to share. Second, it’s doing that in a way that works for you and making it happen.
This essay is about that process.
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Dear Black, Brown, Indigenous, Person of Color and Queer, Trans, Non-Binary Person of Color,
Being “too much” to whom?
Who is telling us we’re too much? Where does the problem really lie?
Feeling what you feel, making your discomforts and pains public, or leading a change — specifically about your position in the world because of white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy — can be “too much” for others — reliably, white women, men—people, and others who identify closely to whiteness. They’re people who are ‘burdened’ by happening to come across a small sliver of your reality. You navigate it every day and move along in all other aspects of your life despite it. I used the word ‘reliably,’ because we’ve heard these things dozens of times repeatedly from dozens of people we encounter:
It’s “too much” because you’re whining. It’s “too much” because ‘thinking what you think and saying what you say is overtaking your life.’ ‘It’s paralyzing you and holding you back.’ ‘It’s not oppression olympics.’ 'You’re self-absorbed.’ It’s “too much” because ‘you can will and bootstrap your way out of oppressive systems and people.’ It’s “too much” because ‘it’s an attack on me, I’m a good person.’ ‘It’s “your attitude” that’s holding you back.’
Our lives keep going. We fight the fight. We love our loved ones. We do what we gotta do. We excel. You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
“Your attitude” is not the problem when your peers, friends of friends, colleagues, bosses say homophobic, racist, condescending, aggressive things.
You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
“Your attitude” is not the problem as you go through 15 years of grade school education with your teachers never teaching you about your own people — erased. Degraded.
You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
“Your attitude” is not the problem as real estate developers and each of the new residents violently buy, burn, and tear apart the neighborhoods we’ve been living in for 2, 3 or 10 generations.
You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
“Your attitude” is not the problem when you fear for your family’s life if they were to come into contact with the militarized police force. “Your attitude” is not the problem as you see indigenous women disappear. You connect with other Black and Brown tragedies in ways they can’t experience.
You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
“Your attitude” is not the problem when it took so long to write an essay about your paranoia to shed the voices decades old.
The problem is on them.
You move along in all aspects of your life despite it.
It’s your peers, friends of friends, developers, institutions, colleagues, who have white-supremacist, patriarchal, ableist, elitist, trans-phobic, fat-phobic, misogynistic beliefs. The problem is, by speaking out and taking up space on any of these things, you’re holding up a mirror to themselves. They may not understand that’s what’s happening to them but the reflection back to them is what’s unsettling to them — their uneasiness is coming alive in front of their eyes in the form of your black and brown bodies speaking and transgressing. Or, they read up and ‘know’ about the struggle, and still, your bodily chronic experiential knowing about the struggle and the ways you’ve come to deal with it is a burden, ‘you’re doing it wrong.’ You don’t get the benefit of the doubt that you’re speaking on the wrongs and in the same step you’re thriving and taking care of yourself and others. This 7-minute read, a 2 hour conversation, 10 days, or whatever extremely brief moments they’re encountering you transgressing is “too much.”
And that’s not your problem. That is not your problem.
what about this theory. the fear of not being enough. and the fear of being ‘too much.’ are exactly the same fear. the fear of being you. — Nayyirah Waheed
We already do plenty of suppressing and letting things slide to not shake things up for them. You’ve strategically filtered “your attitude” through. In your conversations, your writing, your actions. You are extremely generous. You’ve thought of their comfort and your own emotional wellbeing — the emotional labor of explaining your humanity to someone, the dread of things not understood, the sleepless tossing and turning nights because people’s dissonance from their own whiteness is so disturbing. We draw boundaries for our own health. All they’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg. And still, it’s “too much.”
You are rich and luscious. The pressure to shrink — the problem —does not start in you.
“Let me teach you about yourself.”
The voices that linger. Things these same people advise you in order to be less “too much.”
They’ll quote from books by Audrey Lorde, bell hooks, or other brown and black thinkers to teach you about yourself. The tragic irony. The degree of dissonance.
These are the voices that sometimes overwhelm me as I get my own thoughts in order in the moment. These are the voices that essentially tell me I’m “too much.”
- “What you said is disrespectful.”
- “It should be said in a kind, digestible way.”
- “I can’t believe you’re refusing to help me.”
- “My uncle marched with Dr. King and his friends were chill.”
- “If you step outside yourself and find perspective, you’ll mature out of this.”
- “We cannot presume others’ experiences. It’s not about us. It has nothing to do with us.”
- “Once you’ve experienced life as I have, you will know that’s just how it works.”
- “Our guilt won’t get us anywhere.”
- “These things happen all of the time, and you just have to move on.”
It’s by the book. In fact, it doesn’t enter their mind you’re not white and how illogical it is to lump you into their ‘we,’ ‘us.’ Their relationship with other Black and Brown people in the room is not the same as yours. Their relationship with a neighborhood is not the same as yours. Their relationship with history is not the same as yours. Their corrective modes of operating (the path from oppressor to self-aware transgressing human) with other black and brown individuals should not be yours. Your path most definitely, absolutely should not be modeled after their corrective modes of operating. Their positionality is not your positionality in the world.
You have affordances and subtle connections with people like you in the struggle that they don’t and can’t have.
Stand in your position.
In Japan, there’s the notion of being humble and aware of one’s position especially when it comes to giving advice or compliments. It’s not a matter of whether the advice is true or not. It’s completely that they’re not person you need or want to hear that from. To be aware of that position—whatever it may be—is a gesture of respect for another human being’s space. Also, ‘I didn’t ask you.’ is a thing.
Hold on to who you aspire to.
Name the individuals you aspire to. Who are the people you do solicit enriching advice from about dealing with this stuff? It may be one person, and that’s ok. You may not have that person yet and are looking, and that’s ok. You may have never met the person but you read their books, watched their videos, or listened to their songs. You might call them on your lunch break, look at their Instagram or youtube channel in a bathroom stall, or ask them to step out on a walk with you. They’re who you’ll look to as the model, the north point on your compass. Someone outside of yourself you can rely on. To call on or meet with, or if you don’t know them personally or they’re not available, the idea of them, a thing you own that represents them, or your memory of them.
Follow the trails
Look for likeminded folx and their social media for more people to follow, read, and watch. Surround yourself. Be aware of the proportions of invited influence versus unsolicited influences.
Here’s my trail for you:
Author and content creator Seren, a.k.a. Sensei Aishitemasu’s YouTube channel and appearances on The Grapevine debates.
Karen B. Hanna, Living Beyond Survival: 11 Tips for Women of Color in Academia. She published, “A Call for Healing: Transphobia, Homophobia, and Historical Trauma in Filipina/o/x American Activist Organizations” in 2017.
Karen was so kind and generous to me when I cold emailed her for advice about going into academia. I’m grateful.
A message from Janet Mock in collaboration with music artist Blood Orange:
You asked me what family is
And I think of family as community
I think of the spaces where you don’t have to shrink yourself
Where you don’t have to pretend or to perform
You can fully show up and be vulnerable
And in silence, completely empty and
That’s completely enough
You show up, as you are, without judgment, without ridicule
Without fear or violence, or policing, or containment
And you can be there and you’re filled all the way upSo we get to choose our families
We are not limited by biology
We get to make ourselves
And we get to make our families
Meta Thoughts
Even still as I write this for folks like us and for me, I literally have those same voices in my head weighing down the words that I write. I also felt ugly writing this. I re-read this essay and tried to take in what I had just written. I remind myself of all the folx before me who’ve already written about this. I remember I’m laying one brick on the house already being built. I think I managed to get the nagging voices off me. That’s the metric I’m using to check with myself whether or not I’m finished writing.
