There's a meme that goes around periodically that says something like, "If I'm too much, then go find less," and while I agree with it in theory, I struggle with it in practice. I've written before about constantly feeling like I'm too much. I feel it all the time. My therapist tells me often that I'm intellectualizing things and I should try to connect with them on a more visceral level, but what he doesn't know is that I do this because otherwise I would drown in my feelings. Everything is very big, very immediate, very loud and forceful and overwhelming, and if I can't express it in the moment, I think I'm going to die. It lives in my body, this need to get out the things that dominate my emotions. My hands shake and my heart races and my muscles tense for flight when I try to repress things and bottle them up.

If I love you, it's a wild, overpowering love and you need to know about it. If you've hurt my feelings, I'm devastated and I won't be able to recover from it until you understand exactly how big the pain is. If I'm excited about something, I want to scream about it and jump up and down and get the zoomies like my cats do in the middle of the night when I would love to be sleeping.

I don't let this part of me out very often because I have learned to feel self-conscious about it. I have learned to view it as a character flaw, something to downplay and apologize for. Sorry I'm like this. I know I'm a lot. It's okay if you can't deal, I don't blame you. I don't want to deal with myself most of the time. Etc etc. I offer people an out when I feel like I've been too real with them and they surely don't appreciate it for the gift it is. I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable with my too-much-ness.

This is why I have said, countless times over the years, that I wish I were a funny person and instead I'm just embarrassingly sincere. I love funny people. I'm drawn to them inexorably, most of the time to my own detriment because funny people have a tendency to be assholes. I'll forgive them anything, excuse any bad behavior, if they make me laugh. I want so badly to be one of them, because humor is a deflection. It's a wall between you and the rest of the world, one built of jokes and flippant dismissals and self-deprecating comments to let your audience know that you know you're ridiculous. I do know I'm ridiculous, and by inviting other people to laugh at me, along with me, I can mitigate the hurt of realizing that I'm a joke I didn't know I was telling.