Somewhere between intention and obsession, I lost the plot.
A few months back, a simple message from a man I’d been dating sent me down a spiral of potential responses. I drafted the reply in my head. I chewed on it, mulled it over, savored it for hours, looking at it from every possible angle. Would I come across as too interested? What was the right level of depth to let him know I was serious without admitting that it was game over, that I might be falling for him? What could I say to keep him on his toes? Or rather, what should I say to protect the image of self I was crafting, that I cared just enough, not too much, not too little?
This is just a glimpse inside my head, and I find it hard to believe my case is unique among all the conscientious, driven women in the dating pool. The tendency to overthink, to filter, to manufacture our image. Diluting ourselves down to something that’s just a whisper of who we are to get the outcome we (think we) want.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of behavior from men, and it’s utterly repellent. The more I sense that a guy’s contorting himself to be who he thinks I want, the more I pull away. Joke’s on him: I may want something, but it’s certainly not the version of himself he’s fabricating. What I want to say to men like this is nobody wants the pseudo-you. If they wanted you, they would want you as you are. And if they don’t want you as you are, that’s a relief. Because someone else will.
The proof runs in the other direction, too. With the men I’m not interested in, I naturally give off the detached vibe. Leaving them on read, walking into a room without wondering who’s looking or what to say. Not trying to be anything more or less. And men chase that energy, they eat it up. The aloofness, the lack of agenda, the contentment with myself exactly as I am.
I know all of this. And still, the moment I actually care about someone, the self-study starts again.
Where does this come from, constantly wondering whether we’re too much or not enough?
Tracing back to childhood, I began questioning myself because I sensed a gap between what people said and what I understood to be true. I always had short hair and bangs growing up, until sixth grade when I saw the older girls with long hair and wanted that look for myself. After a year of growing my hair out, my grandmother said to me, “Sara, your hair is so LONG!” From the outside, someone might hear that as a compliment, but as an empathic child, I felt her meaning plainly under the surface: “You need a haircut.”
The pattern followed me into high school. I wasn’t one of the cute girls, never the type for guys to have a crush on. But when I had a bit of a glow-up in tenth grade, a boy showed interest, and I was (understandably) excited about it. Then people started talking: “I can’t believe she thinks he likes her.” Looking back, what I think they really meant was, “I hate that he likes her instead of me.” The gossip wasn’t about my value, my enough-ness or too-much-ness. It was about theirs, their own image, their own place in the social order.
All the mixed signals and subtext created confusion. A muddy sense of who I was and who I was becoming. I walked through the world questioning how I was perceived, as if how they saw me was more important than my own experience of life. I painted an image of myself, waited for the world to critique it, then painted over it again and again. And the work would never be complete. When would I get to finish the image, put it on the wall, and go look at something else?
I’ve been thinking about the real cost of deliberation. The price you pay while questioning whether you’re too much or not enough. It’s that you build your life inside a fish bowl, imagining that everyone else is staring in at you. You crave real connection, and you think you’ll get it by appealing to what others want to see. But you can’t find depth in six inches of water.
Diving a layer deeper: if deliberation costs us so much, why do we keep doing it? Because it serves a purpose. You think you want intimacy, but the self-manufacturing is a defense against the raw feeling of true vulnerability: being fully seen, and possibly not accepted. Presenting yourself exactly as you are, then sitting in the thirty seconds, or thirty minutes, or thirty days of wondering whether someone will meet you on the other side without judgment.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. Tired of editing, reworking, refining the image. What I really want is not to be looked at, but to be remembered for my pure presence, the way I think and how I make people feel. I want a life where my image isn’t part of the equation. Where I’m not watching from the outside, but actually living, even if the fullness of it is the scariest part.
The fear assumes there’s a verdict waiting, some final ruling on whether I’m too much or not enough.
What if there’s no verdict coming? What if there’s nothing left to filter, nothing to add or subtract or refine or reconcile?
We are all too much. We are all not enough. And I trust that the right people will meet us exactly where we are.
