Most of the those who find their way to this work arrive carrying some version of the same contradiction.
They have been told, in various ways and at various points in their lives, that they are too much. Too loud. Too intense. Too direct. Too emotional. Too present. Taking up too much space, making too much noise, wanting too much, needing too much.
And simultaneously they have been told, often by the same rooms, that they are not enough. Not qualified enough, not calm enough, not palatable enough, not the right kind of enough.
What strikes me about this contradiction is not the cruelty of it, though it is cruel. What strikes me is the function it serves.
A person who is simultaneously too much and not enough can never quite land. They are always adjusting. Always calibrating. Always running the quiet background calculation of how much of themselves is acceptable in this particular space, with these particular people, at this particular moment.
This is not personality. This is a nervous system that learned, very early and very efficiently, that its natural expression was not reliably safe to offer.
The calibration is intelligent. In the rooms where it was learned, it worked. It kept relationships intact. It navigated systems that were not designed to accommodate the full frequency of who this person actually was. It was a genuine survival strategy.
The cost of that survival strategy, sustained over years, is the gradual erosion of the ability to know what your own signal even sounds like. When you have been adjusting for long enough, you can lose access to the uncalibrated version of yourself. The one that existed before you learned which parts to turn down.
IMIE is not about becoming louder or taking up more space as an act of defiance. It is about something quieter than that.
It is about learning to access your own signal again. Not the performed version. Not the calibrated version. The frequency underneath those, which was never actually lost, only buried beneath layers of adjustment.
That frequency is still there. It has been there the entire time.
The work is simply to find your way back to it.
