Aim to Be Average. Then People Will Love You.
My mother actually said this to me.
Not as a joke. As advice.
I had just lost my job, my best friend had decided I was too much to deal with and disappeared, and I was somewhere between the floor and barely functioning. And my mother, two floors above me, looked me in the eye and said: you put yourself on a pedestal, you earned too much, you made yourself too special. Aim to be average. Then people will love you.
I want you to sit with that for a second.
The solution to my life falling apart, according to the woman who raised me, was to become less. Smaller. More manageable. More digestible. More average.
And the most messed up part? For a while I believed her.
Not out loud. I would never have admitted it. But somewhere in the back of my head, while I was ordering my own medicine via Uber because I had a 39 degree fever and nobody to call, I was running the calculation. Maybe I am too much. Maybe I push people away. Maybe if I had been quieter, less ambitious, less whatever I am, they would have stayed.
My friend leaving confirmed it. He said I was aggressive. That is why he had not shown up when I needed him. My fault, apparently. My volume. My intensity. The inconvenient way I exist.
I believed that for longer than I should have.
Here is what I know now.
People who need you small will always find a reason. Too loud. Too ambitious. Too emotional. Too honest. Too healing, even. The moment you start taking up the space you were always supposed to take, they will call it aggression. They will call it ego. They will tell you to aim to be average.
Because average is easier to control. Average does not ask them to grow. Average does not hold a mirror up to the life they chose not to question.
You were not too much.
You were too much for people who needed you to be less so they could feel like enough.
There is a difference. It took me a while to find it. But once you do, you cannot unknow it.
Stay loud. Stay large. Stay exactly as inconvenient as you are.
The right people will not ask you to shrink.
Has anyone ever told you to be less so they could be more comfortable? Tell me below.
rise · believe · fly 🪶
From the Ashes She is for the woman in the middle of it. Not after. If this found you today, you are exactly where you are supposed to be.