I spent the month of Ramadan healing, or what I thought healing was. It brought me peace, clarity, and healed my heart of the damage that I let mankind inflict on me. I cut off human interaction. I swore off love. I swore off commitment. I wanted to be happy on my own. Focus on me, all that shit. I thought the only way I could be happy was to be alone. Everyone says you need to heal on your own, which I agree with, but I took it to the extreme. Until my mom sat down and talked to me.

I give myself to people in doses. I’ve led my life believing I’m a “too much” woman. Too loving, too emotional, too anxiety ridden, too of everything, so why would anyone want to deal with that? My past partners, my dad, my friends have all made me feel like I’m too much. I always love more than everyone else. What I need is “too much”. I'm demanding. I manipulate people with my emotions etc etc. I started to internalize everything that had been hurled at me throughout the years because there comes a point in your life where you can no longer blame everyone else. You must be the problem, right?

As I sat down in the kitchen of my grandmother's lake house on vacation with my mom, I broke down. I finally admitted to her that I needed help. As she asked me what was wrong, the only thing that came to mind was a piece of a suicide note that my friend wrote and shared with the world on twitter “if you’ve ever wanted to cut yourself but were afraid of knives, ever wrote to everyone you loved in hopes they’d find your journal with your body...”

I was repressing myself to the point that I was shrinking away. I was a “too much” woman for so many people in my life that I didn’t know how to live. I didn’t know how to be... I wanted to cease to exist but I was too afraid to make the pain stop. As I cried to my mother I couldn’t say the words “I wanted to die” or “ I wanted to kill myself” yet the line from my friends note kept playing in my head as tears streamed down my face. He put the words of what I was too afraid to say on paper.

As I talked to my mom I voiced that I had needed a certain level of emotional support from the people around me, that I felt like I wasn’t getting. Part of it was that I was too afraid to ask, on the other hand, I also didn't think anyone would want to give me the kind of emotional support I needed. I had this on going fear that I was "too much" to handle. All the fears I had held in my heart all those years came pouring out, I had never told anyone before and I didn't know how my mom would respond. Even as I opened up to my very own mother, I didn't think she'd be able to handle what I was admitting to her. Yet she said something to me that changed my entire life....

She told me I was too much. I was too emotional, too loving, too loud, too vocal, all the things I had been so afraid of being, I was. And that was okay. I had spent my entire life hearing half ass attempts of “you’re not too much” believing that if I did get to the point of “too much” I had to scale back. My mother told me to be too much. To love as ferociously as my body wanted me to. To cry as openly as I needed to. She told me to surround myself with people who respect my “too much”. Who love my “too much”. Who believe my “too much” is the norm. Those people would want to be my emotional support system because my "too much" wouldn't be "too much" for them. It’s simple, right? My parent told me “just be yourself” and it changed my whole world. I think it changed my whole world because for the first time I accepted me, for me. I no longer have the fear of sharing myself with the world and the world wanting to return me.

If you actually made it to the end of this insanely long blog post I hope you take one thing away from it. Be you. I'm not talking about the watered down version you’ve presented to the world. Or the “I’m this person with them and this person with them”. No. Be authentically, one hundred percent you, at all times. Stop catering to the people around you. If people don’t appreciate what you have to offer, cut them off. If the world wants to return you, let it.  There are people out there, jobs out there, schools out there that want you. All of this sounds so cliché but I hope I’m saying it in a way that changes your life the way my momma changed mine.

I became who I am this summer. The realest, most authentic version of myself. I’ve lost a few friends, a few relationships have changed, but I made life long friendships and fell in love which, I never would have if I hadn’t started being unapologetically me. I started presenting my "too much" self and sure, some people didn't like it, but those that did started to love and appreciate me in a way that I had never experienced when I was shrinking myself. The people who met me this summer, and the people I reintroduced myself to, met a different Kayla than the one who has been walking the earth for twenty years. Hell, I even introduce myself as Kayla Myelle now. I’ve reclaimed my title and who I am. I haven’t been happier.

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