ON: Being "Too Much"

The boxes we try to fit into

Song of the Week: “The Party,” by Regina Spektor - “You’re like a big parade through town / You leave such a mess, but you’re so fun”

I went to see the 2018 action comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me for a simple reason: it starred Sam Heughan, a.k.a. Outlander’s Jamie Fraser, in a supporting role. As I sat down with my popcorn for the Tuesday matinee, the gaggle of elderly ladies next to me shared in my excitement. “I just love that man,” one of them whispered to me. “He’s a real dish!”¹

The Spy Who Dumped Me centers on a young LA grocery clerk named Audrey (Mila Kunis) who finds out her ex-boyfriend was a CIA agent after he’s killed in front of her. She and her best friend Morgan (Kate McKinnon) escape to Europe with a top-secret flash drive, and hijinks and mayhem ensue as various shadowy operatives chase them through cafés, train stations, and cobblestone streets. 

I went to see The Spy Who Dumped Me for Sam Heughan, who is perfectly lovely as a charming MI6 agent, but the movie has stuck with me because of Kate McKinnon’s performance. Morgan is loud, eccentric, and over-the-top, and her quirks and reactions provide a lot of the movie’s laughs. 

Take, for example, a scene where she has to meet a Canadian ambassador and his wife at the airport and steal their tickets to a gala.²

In a rare quiet moment, however, Morgan tells Audrey about the moment she first met her ex-boyfriend a year ago. “Has anyone ever told you you’re a little much?” he asks, sizing her up quickly. 

“You know that thing Drew said to me about being a little much?” she confesses. “It’s not the first time I’ve heard that.” 

“You’re not a little much!” Audrey protests. 

“I am. I’m a lot much.” 

“No, no, you’re not,” her friend insists. “The only people who don’t think so are you and my parents,” Morgan admits.

“That’s because everyone else is boring,” Audrey finally says. 

I like the way Audrey’s tone shifts here, from denying that her friend stands out, to affirming that she loves that about her. Because - even though I didn’t go to circus camp, and I don’t whip out a Cockney accent at the slightest opportunity - I know that I can be “a little much” too. 

Kindred Spirits

My mother named me Melodie Anne Roschman partially in honor of one of her favorite literary characters, Anne Shirley. Anne of Green Gables (1908)’s titular orphan is famously stubborn, opinionated, outspoken, competitive, and has an enormous imagination. In the scene where her adoptive parent Matthew first meets her, she chatters away all about her struggles in the orphanage, her world of make-believe, and her appreciation for the beauty of Prince Edward Island in June. 

“Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about?” she asks Matthew. “It just makes me feel glad to be alive - it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can stop when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult” (12). 

Fortunately for Anne, the shy and simple Matthew is already charmed by Anne and her chatter. “Oh, you can talk as much as you like,” he says. “I don’t mind.” 

“Oh, I’m so glad. I know you and I are going to get along together fine,” she replies. “It’s such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I’ve had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?” (12). 

In the years that follow, Anne constantly gets into scrapes and misunderstandings, from breaking her slate over a classmate’s head because he makes fun of her red hair, to nearly drowning while acting out a Tennyson poem. At the same time, however, she gradually wins the hearts of the plain-spoken and practical people of Avonlea because of her diligence, kindness, and romantic nature. 

Unsurprisingly, as an eccentric chatterbox of a child who also loved stories, puffed sleeves, and imagining everything as larger than life, I glommed on to Anne as a kindred spirit. I talked constantly and quickly, to the point where my report cards said that I needed to slow down so my classmates could understand what I had to say. In fourth grade, a boy in my class said that my loud laugh sounded like a seal, and for years I tried to suppress it around my classmates. 

I had very few friends in elementary school, and spent hours reading and writing and staring into space. 

When I read Anne of Green Gables, I didn’t just find solidarity in Anne: I found reassurance that I could learn to regulate my emotions and share conversational space while still maintaining my independence and passion and whimsy. 

When I overheard a relative complain that she was reading the book and found Anne insufferable and annoying, it stung like she had said it about me. But, of course, the opposite was true as well: for a weird, misfit kid, the novel’s worldwide popularity and cherished place in the hearts of millions of readers made me think that maybe I was likable too. 

When I met my best friend Jillian at 13, I really did feel like Anne meeting her “bosom friend” Diana for the first time and realizing there was someone who understood her deeply.³ From then on, we were inseparable and united in adventures, through high school and university, graduate school and the long, dangerously monotonous plodding of day-to-day adulthood. 

A couple weeks ago, Jillian sent me a Facebook post from the account “Vintage Pages,” noting only that it reminded her of me. In her analysis of Anne Shirley’s enduring popularity - and the experience of the little girls who saw themselves in her - the author writes: 

 She's every kid who's ever been told they're "too much"—too loud, too weird, too intense—and decided that being too much is infinitely better than being not enough.

Montgomery's genius lies in how she never patronizes Anne's internal world. When Anne rechristens Barry's Pond as "The Lake of Shining Waters" or decides that the avenue of apple trees is "The White Way of Delight," Montgomery doesn't present these as childish flights of fancy—she shows them as acts of creative rebellion against a world determined to drain the magic out of everything. Anne is performing the same alchemy that every artist learns: taking the raw material of reality and transforming it into something bearable, beautiful, meaningful.

Respectable

The phrase “too much,” of course, is frustratingly vague. It can refer to someone who is rude and overbearing, or someone with unusual hobbies, or someone who doesn’t fit the societally acceptable standard of gender or race or ability. 

While anyone can be dismissed as “too much,” often it is a label that is particularly given to neurodivergent people (such as those who are autistic or have ADHD), queer people, and people of color. A gay man’s voice and mannerisms may be considered too flamboyant, a neurodivergent person’s interests too embarrassing, a Black woman’s natural hair “unprofessional.” 

Often, people from marginalized communities feel pressure to modify their behavior in an effort to achieve acceptance or not be negatively treated for their perceived “otherness.” This pressure - and the behavioral changes that result from it - are commonly known as “respectability politics.” 

As Mikaela Pitcan, Alice E Marwick, and danah boyd write in “Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World,” “Respectability politics reinforce designations of appropriate or inappropriate behavior rooted in structural inequality…by privileging racist, sexist, and classist values, respectability politics lead members of subordinate groups to internalize them.” 

In her memoir I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness (2018), Austin Channing Brown talks about the continual hostility she faced as a Black woman working as a diversity educator in majority-white non-profit and religious spaces. When she names structures and policies as racist, she’s condemned as divisive.She describes a moment when her coworkers surround her, place their hands on her body, and pray for her:

They gather round, lay their hands on my shoulders. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, listening to their words. But before I know it, the prayers take a turn. They are no longer about my circumstances but about me. They ask not that I would be understood but that I would find it within myself to give more grace. The prayers don’t ask that doors would open for me; they ask that God would gift me with skills they wish I had. These prayers aren’t for me. The prayers are that I would become who they want me to be. “Lord, make this Black person just like us”...Whiteness wants us to be empty, malleable, so that it can shape Blackness into whatever is necessary for the white organization’s own success. (79)

Throughout the memoir, Channing Brown faces both overt and subtle digs at everything from how she dresses to how she talks. She is too loud, too expressive, too assertive. In other words, she isn’t working hard enough to conform to a certain confining standard of what those in power expect from her.

Aren’t We Lucky?

This week, my book club read Alison Espach’s The Wedding People (2024), a novel about two women who meet and become friends under unusual circumstances: Lila, a wealthy and spoiled bride, has rented out a fancy Rhode Island hotel for her week-long wedding celebration, and Phoebe, a recently-divorced English professor, has arrived at the hotel planning to kill herself. 

Thoughtful, emotional, and darkly funny, the novel traces the unusual friendship that develops between the two women as they find they can only be honest with each other. For Phoebe, particularly, her blunt honesty with Lila and the other wedding guests is a departure from the way that she has lived up to that point. Growing up with a single, depressed father, Phoebe has spent her entire life desperately wanting to be normal. 

She works hard to achieve what’s expected of her all the way into graduate school, lets her husband set the tone and direction of their relationship for their marriage, and frequently acts as a spectator in her own life out of a fear of standing out or rocking the boat. As a result, her life shrinks around her, and eventually she finds herself without anyone who truly knows her because she has been too afraid to be seen in her messiness and her need. 

From her rows of Banana Republic cardigans that she bought not because she likes them but because they won’t draw attention to her, to her tendency to always tell people what she thinks they want to hear from her, Phoebe realizes that the social identity she has built for herself as a “good” woman has become its own straitjacket. “I just lived my life in such a small way,” she reflects. “It was too small. I was so convinced there was only one way to live my life.” 

As Phoebe gets to know the wedding guests, she finds herself opening up to them in ways she hasn’t allowed herself to in years. “This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing - the freedom to say or be anything around them.” Freed from her fears about being or needing “too much,” Phoebe is honest, perceptive, funny, and weird, and people come to love her for it. 

“Maybe this is just one of the really nice things about getting older,” she muses.  “Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse. Because no amount of truth can be worse than the feeling she got after years of hiding from it.”

Phoebe’s realization - that the people who truly love her will love her for her messiness and honesty and quirks, not in spite of them - reminds me of a poem by Lyndsay Rush that makes me feel seen. Maybe it will help you too, whichever way you’ve ever felt “too much.”

She’s a Bit Much 

You mean like a bonus french fry in the bottom of the bag? 
Like a champagne shower? Like triple texting good news? 
Like buying coffee for the person behind you in line? Or did
You mean ‘a bit much’ like an unexpected upgrade to business
class / or theme parties / or the band pretending to go off
stage and then coming back for an unforgettable encore? 
Perhaps you were referring to that thing of being astonished
by a sunset / or how puppies flop around when they learn to
run / or the way some people take karaoke really seriously? 
Maybe you just meant sprinkles / confetti / balloon drops / 
witty comebacks / generous tips / fireworks / waterslides / 
serotonin / cherries on top / and the fact that maybe we were
put on this planet simply to enjoy ourselves? Then yes, I 
Agree—she is a bit much. Aren’t we so lucky she’s here? 

When it comes to being “too much,” what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. One of the things I miss the most about graduate school was being able to go to matinees by myself on weekdays.

2. Won’t someone realize they don’t look like them, Audrey wonders? “No one ever remembers what Canadians look like,” her companion replies.

3. Though it must be said that Jillian is a far more interesting and assertive person than poor Diana Barry.