“you’re too much”
on the dissolution of limiting self-beliefs
If asked to describe what a personal breakthrough feels like in the body, the closest comparison I could draw from would be a wave. I’ve always thought life lessons would be instantaneous, akin to the sharp strike of lightning. It’s much slower. Slow like the sea in the early morning, water lapsing over the rocks, enticing and safe. Of course, there’s the initial event that sets this in motion, and for me, it just so happens to start on my solo trip at 2 am, giving a running dialogue of my inner workings to someone I had no idea I would end up meeting. But let us start at the beginning, for I only began to notice the changes weeks later.
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-limiting beliefs, most notably those that impact our ability to connect authentically. Interestingly, I find that I’m often not aware of my own till I experience something that disproves them, leaving me to question why I hadn’t felt as liberated up until that time. I spoke a little about this in a recent TikTok.
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“[I’m] happy today because life really is better when you acknowledge your need for connection in whatever form. Calling people out of the blue. Sending them the link to whatever made you think of them, even if you’re not that close. Triple texting, saying the funny thing, giggling when you’re not supposed to. It’s harder to overthink life when you show up exactly as you are.
For context, after a series of deliberate choices, such as cold calling friends, blurting out what was on my mind, sharing links, discussing them, and spending time laughing with people, I felt secure. I was walking around with a warm feeling in my chest, quite different to the nagging weight of pre-emptive anxiety that often made itself at home there. When it came to people I know, old and new, I hadn’t overthought in a while. Perhaps because I’d begun stopping the spiralling in its tracks by doing the very thing I was scared of. I felt great, and I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so assured. So as I do, I investigated.
It dawned on me that all of the examples I gave above would have made me think twice a year ago, let alone a couple of months ago. The culprit: believing I was too much for people or that my instincts to bond were overbearing. You see, as I’ve often expressed in this newsletter, I have this overwhelming need to reach out to people and have them reach back. Connection is the currency in my life; it fuels my art, and it fuels me. However, for numerous reasons, I have often tried to dissuade myself from this, suppressing this craving out of fear or worse: recoiling after feeling hurt or discarded. Each disparaging encounter or series of events was used as evidence of my “muchness” and other people’s inevitable reaction to it. Internalising every sad ending, I made everyone else’s problems about me because it felt easier to berate myself than accept the truth: some people are just awful, others only subtly cruel and the rest simply incompatible, which is just life. To make matters worse, I was surrounded by people and circumstances that made it very easy to believe this about myself.
It is my standing that limiting beliefs are made in an attempt to avoid interacting with fear, a necessary emotion and one that can be overcome. But it is the exhaustion found in constantly confronting it that allows those negative beliefs to discourage you from interacting with situations in the first place, not knowing it could turn out for the better. Of course, in doing so, I slowly robbed myself of connection.
So how do we even attempt to disprove something we’ve spent our whole lives gathering (biased) evidence for? Well, fortunately and unfortunately, handling self-limiting beliefs about connection in relationships often involves other people. It’s why we get so jarred when people suggest ‘self-love’ as a one-size solution to such problems. Don’t get me wrong, self-love is paramount; it is the foundation of self-esteem. However, the god’s honest truth is that sometimes it’s easier and you need someone else to show you what you are blind to. If that’s how you come to the healing, I don’t think we should fault someone for that. There’s a long way to go before relying on other people to do the work for you.
I am far from an expert in all this, and I suspect I’ll look back on these ‘revelations’ in a couple of years and scoff at the naivety I probably still possess as a twenty-one-year-old. That this being said this is my solution to all of this for now. Expressed by moi once again in an even more recent TikTok.
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“Here to suggest that the answer to self-limiting beliefs is time. The best advice I’ve subconsciously taken on board is to GIVE PEOPLE THE OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE YOU WRONG. The more situations/people you expose yourself to, the easier it gets. It feels futile and long until the years pass and you notice the subtle changes: Bigger Smiles, Louder Laughs.”
The role of time in all of this can’t be underestimated, and it heals on two fronts. The first being that as things move along as they’re bound to, the further you find yourself from the events that spawned these doubts in the first place. Eventually, the pain is only as intense as the last time you remembered it. This varies depending on your proximity to the parties involved, but hopefully, the time that has passed should still be able to dilute the most bitter of stings.
The second way time works wonders is by bringing new opportunities for you to rewrite these untruths. A friend of mine commented that she thinks it’s important to throw yourself into situations that challenge those self-limiting beliefs so you can watch yourself grow in the experience and I wholeheartedly agree with her.
There have probably been numerous opportunities for me to grow that I’ve been discounted out of fear or uncertainty. There have also been instances that sparked growth, which came about quite haphazardly, which is probably why I didn’t take as much notice of the change stirring within me. The same applies to isolated incidents that were successful but too far apart to track incremental differences, making this summer, the summer in which I took it upon myself to be braver and bolder, the period in which I finally saw how I was growing for the better.
So what are some things I’ve done that led me to believe more in myself? I wrote about this two weeks ago, but solo travelling has allowed me to understand myself better. It’s like an accelerated course on who I am, my desires, my tolerances, and what genuinely sparks my interest. I’ve taken two solo trips, the first being just before my 20th birthday to and the second this year. I plan to take one before my birthday each year. This year, solo travelling led to several new experiences. It felt very Eat Pray Love of me—a fleeting but rewarding connection made with a complete stranger. Perhaps I felt safe in knowing they had no prior knowledge of me, that they were meeting me at my best; nevertheless, I felt comfortable being myself. I can’t express to you (partly because I love my privacy and because we’d be here for ages) how raw and honest I was with myself and with them, especially when compared to how I’ve interacted with people previously.
Was I worried? Absolutely. Was I secretly scared and expecting them not to want much to do with me afterwards, or even during our conversations, not because I’d done or said anything wrong, but because it’s what I expected out of life? A hundred per cent. I’m happy to report that I was very very wrong. I’m not sure what it was about this experience, which, in terms of time, would be considered a drop in the ocean, but watching someone choose to interact with me at my most uncurated and dishevelled was the greatest reward. I think I left the trip eventually feeling lighter and incredibly self-assured.
It’s this same energy I carried back home. I found myself expressing myself more to my friends. Happy to tell them I missed them or that we couldn’t go that long without a debrief again. I felt unleashed. Pursuing connection, no matter how small, seemed doable again.
Whilst events like Lisbon felt like the catalyst for such realisations, I do think I’ve been slowly building up to this unravelling in the smaller choices I’ve made, one of them being starting this newsletter. I can’t underestimate how satisfying it has been to send emails out into the void and have so many people feel safe in telling me that they relate or that my essays helped them in some way. This newsletter is a sort of archive, a treasure trove of evidence that I can look at to remind me that I really can feel seen and I am indeed ‘normal’. That’s partly why I write essays like this; I hope it can help somebody, but I also know it’s helping me. There will undoubtedly be a time when I feel like I’m too much again, and hopefully, I can look back at this essay and remind myself of exactly why I’m wrong to think that way.
The same can be said for things I document on TikTok, and most importantly, the people I’ve met through posting online. New friends, much like my encounter of the summer, have shown me that I am capable of the friendships I want and deserve. In all honesty, I probably owe part of this newfound confidence to them, but the sensationalism surrounding strangers in a foreign country has stolen the spotlight.
With that being said, I plan to dedicate the rest of my summer to throwing myself into the deep end and reaping the rewards. What else is summer for if not just that? I hope wherever you are, you afford yourself the same chance, and that you feel fulfilled in the relationships you surround yourself with.
Until the next time friends,
Onyi.
As per usual, you can find me on TikTok, Instagram (daily media recommendations) and Arca (curated recommendations)
cheers to the journey of being more MUCH-ier and loving every second of it. Thank you Onyi x
i hope this summer you achieve all and more and are able to bask in the beauty of you living and loving it! ✨🩷