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“To every rebellious little girl, every wild, radiant woman who’s ever been told she was too loud, too emotional, too much—May it teach you never to shrink, to never chase love that hurts, and to never mistake silence for peace.” ~ Christina Ditchkofsky, Burnt Letters
Do you remember the exact moment you learned to make yourself small?
Maybe it wasn’t a sudden, shattering event.
It often enters softly—a sharp glance across a crowded dinner table, a heavy sigh from a parent, or a partner rolling their eyes when your excitement fills up the kitchen.
It happens through years of having labels slapped onto my back like unwanted name tags: “difficult,” “contrary,” “inflexible,” and “crazy.” Or those sudden moments you realize you’ve heard this before, like when my first marriage shattered, I was told, “Chrissy, you are too hard on men. Your expectations are unrealistic.” And then years later, standing in another kitchen with a different partner, I heard those exact same words repeated, and you start to think, “Maybe it is me. Maybe I am the problem.”
One thing I have learned is that when people cannot handle the raw depth of your emotional truth, they will almost always attempt to frame your capacity to feel as a character flaw. They will call your fire a threat because they lack the equipment to handle the warmth.
Here is the quiet truth we must begin to swallow:
“Too much” is never a measurement of your true volume. It is simply a reflection of someone else’s emotional container.
Many of us were raised by women who learned to survive by turning themselves into ghosts. We watched our mothers and grandmothers put their dreams on a high shelf, and call their grief “peace.”
When I was bruised and terrified in my youth, the advice handed down to me from older generations was simple: “Be a better wife, and he won’t hit you.”
We inherit these invisible rulebooks:
>> Don’t cause a scene.
>> Smooth over the rough edges.
>> Settle for less so you aren’t left alone.
To avoid conflict, we adopt the survival mechanism of fawning—people-pleasing our way through disrespect, rationalizing cruelty as stress, and apologizing for basic human needs. But when you systematically shrink yourself to keep an unsafe person comfortable, you don’t build a home. You build a cage around yourself and invite toxic and narcissistic personalities to treat your soft boundaries as an open window to be entered.
For everyone, this looks different. But for me, as a registered nurse, I spent decades navigating high-crisis situations and remaining perfectly calm in a storm of chaos. Yet in my personal life, I was drowning in the fog of complex trauma, believing there was something basically wrong with me.
Through therapy, I learned that my nervous system wasn’t broken—it was rewired by childhood chaos and toxic relationships.
That “feral” intensity, that sudden flash of anger, that stubborn refusal to quietly accept mistreatment? That wasn’t proof that you are “crazy.”
No.
Girl, that was your instinct screaming through desperation to keep you alive.
Because when you suppress your voice to keep the peace, your inner fire doesn’t just vanish; it turns inward and causes deeper problems. It leaks into your body as chronic physical exhaustion, anxiety, autoimmune flare-ups, and an agonizing sense of self-doubt.
Unexpressed truth is toxic to the human nervous system.
If you are ready to stop auditioning for permission to exist, begin practicing these four non-negotiable shifts today:
1. Audit Your “Pre-Apology” Language
Catch yourself whenever you say “I’m sorry” before expressing a boundary, an opinion, or a basic need. Stop apologizing for taking up air. Replace “Sorry to bother you.” with “Thank you for listening.”
2. Stop Auditioning for People Who Benefit from Your Silence
Recognize that if a partner, friend, or family member only cherishes you when you are quiet, agreeable, and small, they do not love you—they love your compliance. True love never requires you to erase your own edges.
3. Treat Your Boundaries as Bolt Cutters, Not Insults
Setting a firm boundary is not being “bitchy” or “difficult.” It is an act of radical self-preservation. You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm.
4. Practice Physical Expansion
Notice how your body sits right now. Uncross your ankles, drop your shoulders away from your ears, unclamp your jaw, and take up physical space. Let your body remember that it is entirely safe to occupy the room.
To the woman standing in the wreckage of her own high expectations: you are not too much. You were born into spaces that were far too small for your wings.
Stop waiting for small-minded rooms to build bigger doorways. Let them call you loud. Let them call you difficult. Let them call you crazy.
You have survived the fires that were meant to consume you, and you are allowed to walk into the quiet morning of your own life holding your head high.
“Don’t you dare trim back those wings because they’re taking up all the space in the room. Let them break the roof.” ~ Erin Van Vuren
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