The Thing That Makes You "Too Much" Is the Thing That Makes You Alive

If you've ever been told you're too much — too intense, too excited, too scattered, too unrealistic — I want to tell you a story.

I once worked with a guy named Cole who had lost himself so completely he couldn't remember what used to make him feel alive.

He was functional. He went to work. He paid his bills. He did what was expected. But if you asked him what he was passionate about, he'd stare at you like you'd asked him to solve a math problem in a language he didn't speak.

"I don't know," he said. "I used to care about stuff. I just... don't anymore."

How It Happened

Cole wasn't born flat. As a kid, he was the one who got excited about everything. He'd find a project and disappear into it — building, researching, sketching, planning. He'd come running to whoever would listen, talking a mile a minute about what he'd discovered or what he wanted to try next.

And almost every time, someone would slow him down.

"That's nice, but you need to focus on your schoolwork."

"You always get excited and then you never finish anything."

"Can you please just calm down?"

"Be realistic."

The people saying these things weren't trying to hurt him. They were being practical. They were being responsible. They were trying to help him succeed in a world that rewards consistency and punishes people who bounce between ideas.

But every time they turned down his excitement, a little more of his fire went out.

By the time he was an adult, Cole had learned the lesson perfectly: the thing that made him light up was a problem. So he stopped lighting up.

The Six-Year-Old Who Showed Me the Pattern

I once met a six-year-old who came into my office in a full meltdown. Screaming, throwing things, totally out of control. His sister had destroyed his Lego creation.

Everyone in the room saw a behavior problem. I saw something else.

When the storm passed and the boy reset, I asked him about the Lego set he wanted. And this six-year-old — face still blotchy from crying — delivered a full investment analysis. He knew the cost per piece, the collector value, the projected worth by the time he turned twenty-one. He had a wall in his room dedicated to every creation he'd ever built. He photographed each one in case something happened.

His mother had been making him wait every time he got excited about a new set. Calming him down. Teaching him that his greatest joy was something to manage.

She was teaching him to become Cole.

What I Told Cole

"Cole, the reason you feel dead inside isn't because something's wrong with you. It's because the thing that made you most alive got trained out of you."

"Remember that feeling — the one where you'd find something and disappear into it, where time stopped and everything else fell away? That wasn't distraction. That wasn't being scattered. That was your gut screaming at you: this is who you are. This is what you're meant to do."

"And every person who told you to calm down, be realistic, focus on something practical — they were trying to help. But they were slowly turning you off. And you got so good at being turned off that you forgot there was ever a switch."

Cole sat there for a long time.

"So what do I do?"

"You go find what used to light you up. And this time, you don't let anyone turn it down."

What Changed

It didn't happen overnight. Cole had to dig. He had to remember. He tried a few things that didn't stick — and for a while, that old voice came back: see, you never finish anything.

But then he found it. A project that grabbed him the way things used to when he was a kid. And the fire came back — not the reckless, scattered kind everyone had warned him about, but a focused, creative energy that got him up early and kept him working late because he wanted to be there.

He started building something of his own. Not because someone told him to. Because that thing inside him — the one that had been shut down for years — finally had permission to move again.

"I feel like I woke up," he told me. "Like I've been sleepwalking and didn't even know it."

What This Means for You

If you're reading this and you recognize yourself — if you used to be the excited one, the intense one, the one with too many ideas, and somewhere along the way you learned to turn all of that off — here's what I want you to know:

You didn't lose yourself. You buried yourself. Because the world told you that the most alive part of you was a problem.

It wasn't.

That excitement — that thing that makes you "too much" — that's your gut telling you who you are. It's not something to manage. It's not something to calm down. It's the whole point.

Stop listening to the voice that says be realistic. Start listening to the one that says this is what you were made for.

Cole did. And he woke up.

You can too.

The 4 LAWS of Trust and Talent protect four fundamental human needs: Safety, Possession, Belonging, and Creation. When a child's gift is treated like a problem, the system breaks — and the explosions get louder until someone finally listens.

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Dr. Eduardo M. Bustamante is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist with over 35 years of experience. He is the creator of the 4 LAWS framework and author of "The 4 LAWS of Trust and Talent." Learn more at 4lawsacademy.com.