Every morning, she’d look up from her cereal, and there she was standing behind the glass. She never aged and never moved away from the glass. Sometimes, the mother would knock on the glass loudly, but the child barely noticed. She would pause and feel a strange sensation in her chest, but then return to whatever she was doing. Over time, the child grew, made many mistakes and trusted the wrong people. Touched the stove, fell too hard, and got bruised. The mother knocked harder and tried to signal through gestures, but the girl felt anxiety rise and didn't understand why.One day, in her late thirties, the woman (no longer a child) was brushing her teeth when she caught the mother’s eyes in the reflection. They stared at each other, and for the first time, the woman opened the window. The mother didn’t speak right away; she didn’t need to. She just stepped forward, wrapped her arms around the woman, and finally held her.

I used to think dismissive comments were a form of constructive criticism. When someone cut me off, brushed off an idea, or made a joke out of something I cared about, I assumed I had explained it badly. I thought I needed to be clearer, more confident, or less affected by people’s reactions.For a long time, I believed I needed to “grow a backbone.” If someone challenged me directly, I told myself they were being honest, and I was being too emotional. If someone dismissed how I felt, I convinced myself I was making a big deal out of nothing. I took their reactions as proof that I needed to adjust, soften, or communicate differently. Looking back, I can see how much effort went into trying to make myself easier to accept. It felt simpler to blame myself than to believe that other people just didn’t want to listen. I thought being strong meant staying quiet and letting things roll off my back, even when it left me feeling unseen.Eventually, I started noticing how quickly some people shut down a conversation without really hearing it. I realized they weren’t offering thoughtful feedback. They were just reacting in the fastest way possible, without thinking about how their words landed. It wasn’t honesty, it was habit. That changed how I understood dismissal. It wasn’t guidance, and it wasn’t a sign that I was weak or dramatic. It was usually a sign that the other person wasn’t interested in meeting me where I was. Most people speak first and think later. They care more about ending a conversation than listening to it.Once I saw that, I stopped treating dismissal as something I had to fix in myself. I wasn’t weak for noticing how it felt, and I wasn’t overreacting. I was simply aware of the tension it created. Dismissal often has nothing to do with how good an idea is or how real a feeling is. It usually comes down to a lack of curiosity or care on the other side. And once I understood that, I stopped taking it personally and stopped absorbing it like it was my responsibility.

It’s been a month since I last wrote here. Not because I ran out of things to say, but because life, in its unrelenting way, asked me to be in two places at once.Medical issues in the family pulled me in one direction, business and home life in another. There were days I felt like a hundred threads stretched between people I love, trying to hold everything together with my bare hands.If you’ve ever been that woman - the one managing the invisible load, remembering the appointments, sensing the emotions before they’re spoken, keeping the rhythm of everyone’s life steady while yours falters quietly in the background...I see you.

Some days it doesn’t feel like survival; it feels like humiliation. You wake up already heavy, already behind. The mirror shows you swollen eyes, and the voice inside says “failure” before you’ve even had a chance to breathe.Everyone around you seems to be running ahead — posting their wins, sharing their pictures, living their normal, while you’re still sitting at the bottom of the day, wondering how you’ll get through the next hour.This post is for you. The ones who can’t hold on.I want to say this out loud because I don’t hear it enough: holding on is hard. Sometimes impossibly hard. And if you’re here, reading this, you’re already doing it better than you think.

We do it all the time without even noticing. You write a text, then backspace half of it so you don’t sound “too much.” You start a work email with a little personality, then edit it down until it’s flat and professional. You post a photo with a caption that truly expresses how you feel, then rewrite it three times so it won’t stir the pot. Even in casual conversations, you catch yourself softening what you actually wanted to say. And every time we do this, every time we edit ourselves down, the spark that made the words alive gets lost.

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.

It was supposed to be a girls’ night — easy, light, the kind of night where you wear soft clothes and talk about life over wine. But somewhere between the snacks and the second glass, I said something real and honest. I didn’t raise my voice or cry; I wasn’t unravelling — just letting a quiet truth rise to the surface because that’s how it moves through me sometimes. And I felt it shift, the way one of them stared down into her glass like it suddenly had all the answers, while the other let out a sigh, the kind laced with subtle judgment, before saying, “You think too much. You feel too much. Just let it go.”And I did what I’ve learned to do in rooms that can’t meet me — I laughed it off, changed the subject, and kept my truth in silence instead. But I remember sitting in my car afterward, hands gripping the wheel just a little too tightly, trying to drive home while my heartbeat echoed in the quiet.I didn’t say it out loud then, but I say it now: I wasn’t too much. I was just in a room where emotional depth felt like a threat instead of a gift.

There was this one afternoon, I don’t even remember the date, but I remember the smile.

Not the words you say. But the ones you choke on before they escape your mouth. The flicker of something in your eyes before you scroll past. The passive-aggressive silence.

I didn’t burn any bridges.

You’re standing in the hallway.Maybe the day’s already gotten away from you. You spilled coffee. And maybe forgot something important. Snapped at someone you love. And somewhere in the mess, you hear it:

You’re standing in the kitchen. You just asked a simple question. Maybe something like, “Did you move the towels I left on the chair?”  And an answer comes back—not loud, but sharp. And suddenly, your body tenses. You feel the heat behind your eyes, the tightening in your throat, and the voice rising inside you saying...“Seriously? What was that tone?”“Why do I always have to deal with this?”“I should say something back.”

It didn’t come with a big announcement or a dramatic declaration of transformation. It happened in quiet choices I made almost without realizing it:

There are periods of life where you move through your days with a certain automatic competence — getting the children where they need to go, answering the messages that require attention, keeping up with work and responsibility, and doing it all in a way that suggests steadiness to anyone looking in from the outside. People see reliability, resilience, maybe even strength, and on some level, you’re aware that you’ve cultivated that image without trying. But inside, it doesn’t feel like strength at all. It feels like something quieter and flatter, as if a part of you has dimmed without any clear reason. You’re not feeling proud of how much you’re holding together, and you’re not energized by it either; there’s just this dull, ongoing sense that you’re moving through life slightly out of sync with yourself. Your body shows up, but your inner world feels delayed, as though it hasn’t quite arrived. It isn’t dramatic, and it isn’t a collapse. It’s more like a muted frequency, like a faint vibration in your chest, a heaviness behind your eyes that doesn’t turn into tears, just a persistent reminder that you’re operating on some kind of backup system. You’re functioning, certainly, but you’re not inhabiting your days in the way you once did, and you can feel the absence even if you can’t explain it. People might call it strength, but you know better. It doesn’t feel like resilience; it feels like endurance dressed up as capability, a kind of practiced survival that lets you maintain appearances while something softer and more essential waits in the background to be acknowledged.

There comes a moment when your soul stops trying to convince the room.Not because you're angry. Not because you're defeated. But because you finally realize, you were never meant to be on trial.

There wasn’t a spotlight.No stage and no one was clapping. Just a quiet room, a heartbeat, and the sound of something soft unlocking in me.