You are not too much

And you don't need to file yourself down

I was twelve when my English teacher told me that my creative writing was "too imaginative".

We'd all been handed a character to write about, and mine was a journalist called Magenta Quill.

You cannot give a twelve year old a name like Magenta Quill and then act surprised when things get imaginative.

Beautiful books in a bookshop in Bilbao. Were the authors of these told they were too much at some point? Probably. Credit: Inaki del Olmo

So I wrote about her. And the comment came back from Mr Harter (name changed to protect identity) on the work, in pen: “too imaginative”.

TOO imaginative. In creative writing. I still wonder what he thought we were all doing there. 🤷‍♀️

Here's my favourite part of the story. I genuinely didn't care. I read it, shrugged, and got on with my life, the way you do at twelve when an adult says anything.

My dad, however, cared enormously. He moved me to a different school. (Dramatic? Maybe. But he read that comment and understood exactly what it does to a child over the years, even if the child in question was busy not caring at that point.)

Mr Harter still crosses my mind 26 years on, because "too much" doesn't stop when you leave school. It (sometimes) gets better manners, but it keeps on coming. You're too enthusiastic. Too many ideas. Too "intense"...

I notice how people file themselves down in response. Not because anyone sat them down and said "be less you", but because they picked up the signal and adjusted. I don't think most people could even name the moment it happened. They've just ended up with a permanent sense that the real version of them is somehow inappropriate, especially at work.

That is a shame, because the "too much" bit is usually the bit worth having.

The whimsy. The odd angle. In my case, the walrus-themed morning briefing that turns a boring task list into something I'll actually open. The filed-down version of a person is interchangeable with every other filed-down version, and that's the problem with it. The whacky bits are what set you apart. They make you, you.

So if you're sitting on feedback like this, separate the two questions: "Is this useful?" and "Is this asking me to be smaller?" are not the same question, and it's hard to tell them apart, especially early on. Useful feedback gives you something to do. "Be less you" just gives you something to carry. Do not pick it up.

If you are given that kind of opinion, tell them, as Mr Gilbert put it in The Inbetweeners: "Put your thoughts in any bin. They will reach me." 🗑️

Have you ever been told something was "too much"?