Too much and not enough at the same time

At the party, I am too much. Too loud, too fast, three stories deep while everyone else is still on the appetizers.

I watch the moment land in their eyes — the tiny recoil, the polite smile — and I feel myself become a volume knob being turned down by other people's faces.

Then I go home and replay it, auditing every laugh for authenticity. The hangover from being too much is a full-day event.

Half the night I am the entertainment. The other half I am a cautionary tale about pacing yourself.

The same week, I am not enough. A text sits unanswered for six days. A friend needed me and I was underwater, invisible, gone.

Nobody says “not enough” out loud. They say “you've been quiet lately,” and my brain happily translates it into the worst possible version.

Same person, same week, opposite verdict. Too much when I show up, not enough when I can't. The goalposts don't just move — they multiply.

For years I tried to solve this with calibration: twenty percent less at parties, twenty percent more in friendships, a permanent internal thermostat I had to hold by hand.

It never worked, because the thermostat ran on attention — the exact resource that was already spent.

The maths was rigged anyway: every room had a different exchange rate, and I was expected to know them all by heart.

The problem was never the amount of me. It was that I kept auditioning for rooms that wanted a different show.

What actually changed things was embarrassingly simple: I stopped performing for the wrong rooms and started noticing the right ones, the ones that never asked for a performance in the first place.

• The friend who finds my tangents funny instead of exhausting.
• The people who text “no reply needed, just thinking of you.”
• The rooms I leave with more energy than I brought.

I didn't become less. I became findable — the people who match my volume can only find me if I stop whispering.