IF YOU’VE EVER FELT OR BEEN TOLD YOU’RE TOO MUCH, READ THIS…

It hit me hard, like a wave crashing over me… How was it that I felt more confident dancing in a bikini on a boat full of strangers than I ever did around the people who were supposed to love me?

I was dancing on a boat somewhere in the Greek Islands, in a bikini, in front of a hundred and forty people I had known for all of two days, when a thought arrived that I had not gone looking for.

I could not remember the last time I had felt this alive, and when I actually stopped to count it, the number landed like a stone in my chest. It had been about five years…

For five years I had been slowly shutting myself down. Not in one dramatic moment I could point to and name, but in the quiet, accumulating way a person disappears when they have decided, somewhere underneath their own awareness, that the most natural version of themselves is too much for others, and therefore has to be dulled down.

I had come out of a 5+ year relationship not long before that trip, and I do not need to make this about him, because the truth is he was only ever saying out loud the thing I had already heard and half believed my whole life. That I was too loud. Too ambitious. Too over the top. Too much.

He told me once that empty cans make the most noise. He liked to remind me that there is a reason we are born with two ears and one mouth. And every time I had a voice, every time I spoke up, every time I got something wrong in the way people do when they are young and still learning how to be a person, I was met with the same message underneath it all.

You have done something wrong again.

So I lived, for years, with the low background hum of feeling like I was permanently in trouble.

Here is the part I want you to hear if you have ever lived it too. I had been called too much for as long as I could remember, and yet underneath that I carried a deep, quiet fear that I was somehow also not quite enough. It is a hard place to live. It teaches you to take up less room, and to apologise for the room you do take.

The only face I knew that entire week was my little brother. Everyone else on that trip, all hundred and forty of them across the fourteen boats we island-hopped through, was a complete stranger to me. And something about that turned out to be the most freeing condition I had been in for years.

On the first night of the trip I found myself moving through the group with one of the other people I had just met, introducing myself, asking where everyone was from, learning names and actually holding onto them, quietly stitching the separate little clusters of people into something that felt like one group. By the next day I could name close to half of those hundred and forty faces. Not because I was performing, but because that genuinely is the kind of human I am when nothing is telling me to be smaller. I go towards people. I want to know them.

A couple of days in, one of the guys looked at me and said, my gosh, you are so confident. I laughed, because it’s not a word I would have put anywhere near myself. I guess I appeared confident, but there was always that quiet voice telling me I wasn’t doing enough to be accepted, or too much to be wanted.

I told him it was funny he had noticed, because I did not think of myself that way at all, and that I only really seemed to become this version of myself when I travelled. He asked why, and what came out of my mouth was the most honest thing I had said in a long time. I think it is because I know I’m probably never going to see any of these people again, so why not just be my full, crazy, whole self?

I heard myself say it, and it stopped me. Because the obvious question sitting inside my own answer was this. Why am I only letting myself be fully me in the one place where nobody knows me? Why have I been holding this version of myself back from my actual life?

I had shrunk in my friendships. I had shrunk at work. I had spent years making myself smaller out of a fear that if I took up space, I might be taking it from someone else, or that I would be seen the way I had always been described, as the annoying one, the loud one, the too much one. So I dimmed. I learned to fit in. I apologised, over and over, for the things that were simply me being me.

I want to be honest here, because this is not a story about deciding I get to do whatever I want and calling it authenticity. There is real importance in emotional regulation and emotional intelligence, in understanding that there is a time and a place. The little girl who used to yell out in class for attention, she did not need to keep running the show, and that part is true. But there was another version of me, one who had never once been allowed to express herself fully in a way that felt safe, and who had certainly never been taught how. So she stayed underground. And she only ever came out on that boat full of strangers, because that was the first place in a long time where I did not feel like I was going to be judged for her, and, more to the point, where I had decided I did not much care if I was.

Here is what I understand now that I did not understand then. The parts of yourself you refuse to express do not disappear, and they do not politely wait their turn. They leak out sideways, and they rarely come out looking their best. For me that looked like the good girl who had been agreeable for far too long suddenly snapping because she did not feel taken care of. It looked like oversharing, over-explaining, over-justifying myself to people who had not even asked, all of it a clumsy, dysregulated attempt to finally be seen and heard. I was not difficult. I simply had a whole self in me that had never been given a safe way out, so it forced its own way out at the worst possible moments.

That moment on the boat, the one where I felt seen and safe and got a piece of my spark back, is where I actually started to change. Not because I decided to become louder or more of anything, but because I finally learned how to integrate. To hold the boldness and the regulation in the same body at the same time.

These days I still lead with my whole heart, and I still do my absolute best to regulate myself, and those two things are not in competition anymore. I take up space and I own my mistakes. I am fully expressed and I am accountable for how I land. That, I have come to believe, is where real confidence actually lives. Not in never being questioned, and not in needing everyone to approve of me, but in being able to say, calmly, this is who I am. I know I am not for everyone. And if I am not for you, that is genuinely okay.

What I did not expect was how far that one realisation would travel once I let it into the rest of my life. It is the thing that let me actually go after my goals instead of quietly negotiating them down. It is what allowed me to believe I am allowed to have all of it. It gave me permission to feel joy, and to feel sure of myself, without needing anyone else to hand me that permission first, without waiting for external validation, and without the exhausting full-time job of trying to please everyone in the room.

It is still an evolution, and I think it always will be. But underneath all of it now there is one steady thing, and if I could hand it to you directly I would.

It’s having my spark back.

It is the feeling of being genuinely, unmistakably alive in your own life, and it is a life, with relationships inside it, built to be safe enough and welcoming enough that you get to be your biggest, boldest, most audacious, most beautiful self within them. Free from everyone else's judgment and fully expressed!

It’s what changed my relationship with my body the most too, allowed my energy to become untapped and my ambition a space to finally settle in my body. This is what I wish for you too. The ability to be fully and completely accepted and loved for who you are by yourself (and those around you). This in my opinion is one of the greatest gifts we can have in this life.

So whether you are just starting out on this journey, or you’re deep in the trenches, know there’s hope on the other side. If I can find it in the middle of the Adriatic Sea with a bunch of strangers, your transformation and reclamation is out there waiting for you too!

With all my love,
Sheree xo