This piece is, in many ways, a continuation of "She’s Too Much" blog post. That first post was about the moment someone decides you take up more space than they think you should. It was about that label "too much" and how it gets used to compress someone who is living in their fullness.
This post is about what often comes next: the slow, deliberate dismantling of your work, usually offered under the polite cover of “just giving feedback.”
If "She’s Too Much" post was about the name people give you, this post is about the tactics they use to make sure you earn it in their eyes.
After I published "She’s Too Much", I began hearing from people who had experienced the same shift in energy.
They recognized the moment when praise or curiosity gives way to dissection. When the warmth around your work cools, someone begins to examine it with the detached precision of a jeweler looking for flaws in a diamond. Many people experience it on social media when criticism goes up hill.
Sometimes the critique was verbal and obvious, and other times it was more subtle, delivered through the long pauses, faintly patronizing smiles, or questions designed to shake your certainty.
I know this moment well because I’ve met it in every season of my life, and it rarely begins with something being “wrong.” It starts when what I’ve created becomes undeniable, when it can no longer be overlooked or dismissed, and its presence in the room changes the air. That is when some people lean in, and others begin reaching for tools to take it apart.
The First Time I Felt It
I was in my early twenties, sitting in a boardroom that smelled faintly of fresh coffee and toner. I remember the feel of the heavy glass table under my slightly sweaty hands, the faint vibration as someone tapped a pen on the far end.
In front of me was a neatly organized folder containing the marketing and sales campaign I had been working on for weeks. Those late nights at my kitchen table, eyes burning from too much screen time, the hum of the fridge in the background as I moved words and images around until they finally clicked. I printed it on glossy paper because I wanted it to feel substantial when people held it.
At first, as my colleagues began flipping through the pages, there was nodding, murmured approval, even a few smiles. I felt the nervous flutter in my chest start to calm. Then one woman, well-dressed, confident, and known for her sharp opinions, set her copy down with a deliberate thud and began to go through it, not as a whole concept, but detail by detail. “This color feels off,” she said, her tone making it clear that it wasn’t a suggestion. “This headline is too bold. This image is distracting. Why did you choose this font?”
It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle critique, as I had received plenty before. But this wasn’t about making the work better. She wasn’t engaging with the vision, the message, or the intention. She was dismantling it piece by piece, as if removing bricks from a wall to see how quickly it might fall. There was a tiny curl at the corner of her mouth, a glint in her eyes that suggested she was not there to help me refine anything. She was there to make sure it didn’t stand taller than it already did.
I walked out of that room feeling as if my project had been fed into a shredder, not because it lacked quality, but because it dared to take up space she wanted for herself.
The Silent Room
Years later, I was leading a small workshop in a sunlit meeting space. The room smelled faintly of wood polish and coffee from the urn in the corner. There were about a dozen people seated in a semi-circle, notebooks open, leaning forward as I spoke.
I was telling a story about a client transformation, the kind of narrative that pulls people in because they can see themselves in it. Heads nodded, and a few people smiled in recognition. The energy was warm and connected — the kind of unspoken “we’re all here together” current that makes you feel safe enough to keep going deeper.
And then, from the left side of the room, a man cleared his throat and interrupted. “Olga, on slide five,” he said, “you’ve got a bullet point that doesn’t match the grammar of the others.”
His voice was flat, but the interruption was deliberate. It had nothing to do with the message I was delivering in that moment. The comment yanked the attention from the shared connection and placed it firmly on an irrelevant technicality. I watched as a few people’s attention drifted, the spell broken.
I remember taking a slow breath and making a decision in the space of a heartbeat. I could defend the fifth slide and explain that I had chosen that phrasing for a reason. I could try to wrestle the room’s energy back into alignment, or I could let the interruption slide past me entirely.
I smiled and said, “That’s interesting,” and returned to my point. In that moment, I understood something I wish I had known earlier: the people who needed to hear me already had.
The interruption was never about clarity. It was about reclaiming the focus my words had gathered.
The Most Recent Sting
More recently, I wrote something deeply personal, the kind of post you hover over before hitting “publish” because you know you’re giving people a direct line to your heart.
It was raw, honest, and rooted in an experience that had shaped me. Within hours, messages began arriving from people saying it resonated, that it was exactly what they needed to read that day. I felt that warm, affirming rush you get when your truth lands somewhere it’s welcome.
And then, buried among the comments and private messages, was a paragraph-long critique from someone who chose not to engage with the meaning at all. They fixated on a single word in the piece, the one word out of several hundred, and explained in detail why they would have chosen a different one, complete with alternate suggestions. It was surgical in its detachment, as if the rest of the post had been invisible.
Not long after that, a small but determined group decided to publicly argue that I mainly use writing tools to arrange my work, such as ChatGPT, grammar checkers, and other AI tools.
That moment made me smile. They spoke as if this somehow erased the truth of my words. What they didn’t seem to understand is that when you work alone without a team of editors, proofreaders, or colleagues polishing your work before it’s even published, these tools are only a small part of the process. They’re there to support a little bit, NOT to create the message and slap it down as another story.
Even my stylistic choices, like occasionally skipping the Canadian spelling that adds a “u” to certain words, are intentional. Sometimes I prefer the cleaner visual flow of the alternative, or I choose it to match the tone and rhythm of the piece. Those decisions are mine to make, and they are part of the craft.
The heart of my work has never been just about the arrangement of words on a page. It’s about the presence and frequency carried through them. You could take my writing and place it somewhere else, but without my intention, my experience, and the energy that I bring, it would land differently.
My work is born from where I’ve been, what I’ve witnessed, and what I’m here to offer, and that’s not something that can be replicated by a program or reduced to any specific method.
What I Know Now
Each of those moments revealed the same lesson, but in different disguises.
When a person is unable or unwilling to rise to meet their longing, they will often look for a way to level the ground beneath them so they do not have to feel the discomfort of being reminded of what they have not yet done. If they cannot find the courage or capacity to stand taller, the next easiest thing is to make someone else shorter.
Sometimes this happens with full awareness and intent; other times it is cloaked in politeness, disguised as “constructive” feedback, and even delivered with the belief that it is helpful. But regardless of how it is wrapped, the result is the same: the light you were sharing feels dimmer, not because it lost its strength, but because someone reached over and placed their hand across it.
The real danger in these moments is not found in the words themselves, and not the casual comments, the sudden interruptions, or the carefully timed silences, but in what happens if we allow them to take root inside us.
It is in that slow erosion of trust in our voice, when we start to dilute our work to make it easier for others to swallow, or when we second-guess the very thing we once knew with certainty.
Each time we do this, we send a subtle but powerful signal to our soul: that its work is negotiable, that its truth can be softened or delayed until it causes no ripples. And that, I have learned, is a message we can never afford to send.
The people who are truly meant for you will never feel the need to dissect your light to decide whether it is safe. They will simply step into it, feel the warmth on their skin, and ask for more.
They will understand, instinctively, that your fullness does not diminish them but instead calls them closer to their own. So if you have felt the sting of someone picking apart your work, remember that it is rarely about the work itself. More often, what they are truly pulling at are the loose threads of their unfulfilled truth.
Your role is not to reweave their fabric for them or to make the space so comfortable that they can remain unchanged. Your role is to keep creating, to keep showing up in your entirety, and to keep being “too much” if that is what it takes to be honest. Because while they busy themselves with measuring the edges of what you have built, you will be too busy building something that stands long after their commentary has been forgotten.
This post is dedicated to those of you who work alone.
You carry the full weight of every stage of what you create, from the spark of an idea to the final details before it meets the world; I want you to know that I see you.
I see the long hours you put in without the cushion of a team to catch the mistakes, the quiet moments of doubt you have to work through on your own, and the courage it takes to keep going when the only voice you can count on in the room is your own.
When people nitpick your work or pull at the threads of what you’ve built, it does not mean you are failing; it often means you are succeeding in ways that unsettle them. You are not alone in that experience. You are part of a quiet, determined group of makers who keep showing up, not because it is easy, but because it matters. And the truth is, the ones who matter will never need to take you apart to see your worth. They will recognize it in full and stand beside you in the light.