Your “Too Much” Might Be Your Greatest Abundance
Oct 20, 2026
Article by Emily Bailey
What if the part of you you've spent your life trying to contain is the very place your greatest aliveness lives?
I have a confession to make.
For much of my life, I've been deeply afraid of my own exuberance.
Not my anger. Not my ambition. Not even my intensity.
My exuberance.
The unfiltered delight. The wild hope. The wholehearted enthusiasm. The irrepressible curiosity. The part of me that meets the world with wide eyes, an open heart, and an almost unreasonable expectation that something beautiful might happen.
It's one of the truest expressions of who I am.
And for years, I treated it like something that needed to be managed.
Here's the strange thing: I've had this part of me celebrated in rooms full of strangers. I've been told that my exuberance is rare, inviting, disarming. That it creates a kind of permission for other people to soften, open, and become more fully themselves.
I've even been told that it's healing.
But I've also been laughed at.
Dismissed.
Patronized.
Overprotected.
Underestimated.
Misunderstood in ways that cut surprisingly deep.
And when something so intrinsic to who you are becomes the very thing that leaves you feeling exposed, you learn to get clever about protecting it.
You don't necessarily abandon it.
You just start editing.
You turn the volume down. You rehearse your enthusiasm before you express it. You run your delight through a filter of discernment and intellectual credibility before allowing anyone else to see it.
You learn to be impressive before you allow yourself to be expressive.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, you begin to mistake your carefully curated self for your safest self.
The problem with being “too much”
Somewhere along the way, many of us received the message that there was simply too much of something in us.
Too emotional.
Too sensitive.
Too intense.
Too loud.
Too passionate.
Too curious.
Too idealistic.
Too enthusiastic.
Too needy.
Too ambitious.
Too much.
And because belonging matters, we learned to make ourselves more manageable.
We became agreeable where we were once outspoken. Composed where we were once expressive. Self-sufficient where we were once openly longing for connection.
We became extraordinarily competent at being the versions of ourselves that other people knew how to receive.
But here's a question I wish someone had asked me years ago:
What if your “too much” isn't evidence of something wrong with you?
What if it's pointing toward a place of extraordinary abundance?
The surprising roots of exuberance
I love words. Especially when their histories reveal something we've forgotten.
The word exuberance comes from the Latin exuberare, meaning to be abundant or overflow.
And tucked inside that word is ūber—a Latin word associated with fertility, fruitfulness, and abundance.
Let that settle for a moment.
Exuberance is rooted in fruitfulness.
In overflow.
In the capacity of something alive to produce, nourish, and give beyond itself.
So when I say I'm exuberant, I'm not simply saying I get excited easily.
I'm naming a quality of abundance that wants to move through me.
And suddenly, the accusation of being too much begins to sound very different.
Because yes.
Maybe I am too much.
In the very best of ways.
Maybe there is more delight in me than a particular room knows what to do with.
Maybe there is more hope than my carefully constructed defenses can comfortably contain.
Maybe my heart is more expansive than the identities I've learned to inhabit.
Maybe what I've been calling excessive is actually something fertile.
Something generous.
Something longing to bear fruit.
And maybe the work isn't to make it smaller.
Maybe the work is to grow a life capable of holding it.
When I traded abundance for competence
Here's what I eventually began to recognize about my own story.
When I learned to protect my exuberance, I didn't become less capable.
Quite the opposite.
I became more strategic. More measured. More articulate. More skilled at reading a room and presenting the version of myself most likely to be respected.
I learned to lead with my mind.
And my mind is a beautiful thing.
It's discerning. Creative. Intelligent. Capable of making connections, holding complexity, and bringing structure to what might otherwise remain a wonderful but unformed possibility.
But somewhere along the way, I gave it a job it was never meant to have.
I made it the gatekeeper of my heart.
Instead of allowing my mind to support the abundant aliveness moving through me, I asked it to determine how much of that aliveness was safe to reveal.
And the result was a profound shift.
I moved from the exuberant abundance of my heart into the “not enough” economy of competence.
Not knowledgeable enough.
Not polished enough.
Not credible enough.
Not serious enough.
Not accomplished enough to risk being misunderstood.
The more I organized my life around proving my competence, the less room there seemed to be for the unguarded, wholehearted expression of who I actually was.
And the cruel irony?
The very thing I was trying to protect became harder and harder to access.
Because competence, when it's recruited to defend our worth, can never quite finish the job.
There's always another credential to earn.
Another impression to manage.
Another reason to stay carefully contained.
But exuberance doesn't begin with proving.
It begins with overflowing.
Courage lives in the heart
One of the most significant discoveries in my own rewilding has been this:
When I allow myself to move out of the protective overmanagement of my mind and back into the fullness of my heart, I don't just regain access to my exuberance.
I regain access to my courage.
And perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.
The word courage traces back to the Latin cor, meaning heart.
We often imagine courage as something hard and armored. A clenched jaw. A steely resolve. The ability to endure without flinching.
But some of the bravest things we will ever do require us to become more open, not less.
To let ourselves be seen in our delight.
To express hope without demanding a guarantee.
To love without pretending we don't care.
To speak with conviction while remaining willing to be corrected.
To enter a room without first negotiating which parts of ourselves are acceptable.
There is something deeply vulnerable about wholeheartedness.
About wonder.
About wild innocence.
About exuberant aliveness.
And that vulnerability is precisely why it requires courage.
Not everyone will understand your abundance.
Some people will misread it. Some will dismiss it. Some may genuinely lack the capacity to meet you there.
But their inability to receive it is not, by itself, evidence that you need to become less.
Sometimes it simply means you are being invited to stop measuring your aliveness by the comfort of the room.
Too much is a feast
I've been thinking about this image lately.
A feast.
Not a carefully portioned plate designed to ensure no one feels uncomfortable with how much is being offered.
A table overflowing with bread and fruit and wine and laughter.
A table with room for another chair.
A table where abundance isn't treated as an embarrassment.
It's an invitation.
Too much is a feast.
Too much is something to share.
Too much is an opportunity to expand our capacity to receive.
Too much is what happens when something fertile is allowed to flourish.
Of course, not every expression of our intensity or abundance is automatically wise. We can overwhelm, overstep, or cause harm. Our gifts still need discernment, responsibility, and right relationship.
But that is very different from believing the gift itself is the problem.
A feast still needs a table.
Abundance still needs tending.
And a wildly alive woman still needs the rhythms, relationships, and practices that allow her gifts to become nourishing rather than consuming.
The answer isn't to exile the abundance. It's to create the conditions where it can bear good fruit.
This is what I've come to understand about reclamation.
It's not simply remembering a part of yourself that you've hidden.
It's learning how to live in a way that no longer requires its disappearance.
What is your version of “too much”?
Maybe your abundance doesn't look like mine.
Maybe your “too much” is the depth of your feeling.
The way you notice what everyone else walks past.
The fierce protectiveness you feel when something precious is threatened.
The questions you can't stop asking.
The ideas that arrive faster than you can write them down.
The desire for beauty, intimacy, justice, creativity, adventure, or meaningful connection that refuses to be satisfied with a life organized entirely around what is practical.
Maybe you've spent years translating that abundance into something more acceptable.
Maybe you've become exceptionally good at explaining yourself.
At justifying your desires.
At making your gifts useful enough that no one will question your right to possess them.
But what if you stopped asking, How do I become less?
And began asking:
What is good here?
What is this part of me trying to bring into the world?
What has it been protecting?
What would it need in order to flourish wisely?
What kind of life would have room for it?
And what might become possible for other people if I stopped withholding it?
Because I don't believe our wholeness is meant to end with us.
Goodness is generative.
When we become more fully present to our own lives, we become more available to love, create, contribute, repair, nourish, and participate in the world around us.
What's alive in you was always meant to participate in the aliveness of the world.
I choose too much
I am no longer interested in sacrificing my holy exuberance at the altar of an illusion of safety.
I will not take up competence as a substitute for wholeheartedness.
I will not make my mind the dictator of a life my heart was created to inhabit.
I want my intelligence and my wonder.
My discernment and my delight.
My wisdom and my wildness.
I want to be capable of holding the full, glorious complexity of who I am without turning any one part of me into an enemy.
And I want that for you, too.
Not a life without boundaries.
Not a life without accountability.
Not a life where every impulse becomes a command.
But a life where the things that are deeply alive in you are no longer automatically treated as liabilities.
A life expansive enough to hold your gifts.
A life where your abundance has somewhere to go.
A life where you don't have to keep making yourself smaller to be received.
So yes.
I choose too much.
I choose the feast.
I choose the fertile, overflowing, gloriously alive parts of me that I once believed needed to be contained.
And I will never again willingly exile my too much simply to appear safe, serious, or sufficient.
Because I am beginning to understand something I wish every woman knew:
The part of you you've been taught to make smaller may be the very place where life is asking to become more abundant.
And the world just might need what happens when you let it.
An invitation to your own rewilding
If something in these words has stirred a familiar ache—or a fierce little yes—I want you to know that you don't have to navigate this reclamation alone.
This is the heart of Rewilded, my six-month private coaching experience for women who are ready to stop negotiating against their own aliveness.
Together, we explore the patterns and protective adaptations that have shaped you, reclaim the voice, courage, desire, and vitality you've learned to set aside, and begin creating the rhythms, relationships, and conditions that allow those parts of you to belong in your actual life.
Because recognizing your abundance is one thing.
Building a life that can hold it is another.
And that's where so much of the beautiful, demanding, transformative work happens.
I currently have a handful of private coaching openings, and applications for Rewilded are live.
If you're ready to be challenged, called forth, and deeply accompanied as you reclaim what's true and make it livable, I'd love to explore whether this is the right partnership for you.
Explore Rewilded & Apply Here
Your “too much” doesn't need another apology.
Maybe it needs a bigger table
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