Dr. Rhonda Huff, D.C.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from spending your life feeling like you are somehow both too much and not enough. You are too intense, driven, independent, and outspoken. Yet, at exactly the same time, you feel not successful enough, not attractive enough, not easy enough to love, and not valuable enough to be prioritized. How can both of these things live inside the same person? They coexist because they aren't actually opposites; they are two different expressions of the same question: Is who I am acceptable just as I am?

For years, many women learn to negotiate this question without even realizing it. We learn which parts of ourselves make others uncomfortable and soften them. We become quieter, easier, and less direct, apologizing for taking up space and reading a room before deciding how much of ourselves we can safely bring into it. Somewhere along the way, we trim away the very things that make us who we are.

But shrinking yourself doesn't cure the fear that you aren't enough; it usually feeds it. Once you believe certain parts of you are "too much," you quietly assume the rest of you must work harder to compensate. So you achieve, produce, and give more. You become dependable, capable, and strong—the one who holds everything together and whom everyone calls when they need something. Without ever consciously deciding to, you build a life around proving your worth.

This is where the exhaustion sets in. No accomplishment can permanently quiet a question that achievement didn't create. You can fill your wall with degrees, build a business, survive impossible things, and become the person everyone describes as strong, yet still wonder in quiet moments: Am I enough? When you are a doer, your instinct is to solve discomfort by doing—working harder when something feels wrong, preparing more when uncertain, and proving your value when you feel unworthy.

But what happens when the thing you are trying to earn cannot actually be earned by achievement? This is why "too much" and "not enough" so often live together. One voice says to tone yourself down so people will accept you, while the other demands you work harder so people will value you. If you obey both long enough, you attempt the impossible: spending half your life trying to become less so others can handle you, and the other half trying to become more so you can finally feel worthy. No wonder we are so tired.

The answer isn't finding the perfect middle ground. It isn’t becoming slightly less intense and slightly more impressive until reaching some imaginary standard of "acceptable." The real invitation is to stop using other people’s comfort as the measuring stick for who you are allowed to be. It is time to stop confusing being needed with being valued, assuming that being chosen determines your worth, and believing your strength makes you difficult to love. Most importantly, it is time to stop treating life like an audition.

I am beginning to wonder if I was never actually too much. Maybe I was simply too alive for some rooms, too honest for some conversations, and too passionate for people who preferred indifference. Perhaps I was too independent for people who felt safer when they were needed, and too unwilling to remain small once I realized there was more in me. And maybe I was never "not enough," either; maybe there were simply moments when I handed someone else the measuring tape.

That is a profound difference. If my worth can be increased or decreased by another person choosing me, approving of me, understanding me, loving me, or prioritizing me, then I will spend my entire life at the mercy of someone else's capacity. But if my worth was never theirs to determine in the first place, everything changes. I no longer have to shrink, and I no longer have to prove. I can simply become more fully who I was created to be.

And maybe that is the part we forget. Society has a funny way of telling us what we should be, what we shouldn't be, which parts of ourselves need to be softened, and which parts need to be improved. But perhaps we have given people far too much authority over something that was never theirs to define. If God created me this way, why am I handing someone else the red pen? Why am I allowing another person's preferences, comfort, capacity, or opinion to edit what God intentionally created?

If God wants to soften something in me, He can. If He wants to strengthen something, refine something, remove something, or grow something, He certainly has the power to do it. That is His work. My job is to remain willing enough to let Him change what needs changing without assuming that every person who finds me “too much” has been appointed to do the editing.

There is a difference between being refined by God and being diminished by people.

Maybe healing isn't finally becoming enough. Maybe healing is realizing I was never required to audition for enoughness in the first place. And maybe the parts of me I once worried were “too much” were never the problem.

Maybe they were simply the parts of me that refused to disappear.