You're Not Too Much

Every time I talk publicly about being a woman at work, the first response is the same. It’s never "that sounds hard." It’s "well, I had a terrible boss once, and she was a woman."

Yeah. Okay. Women are allowed to suck, too. Plenty of men suck and we just accept that as fine.

So this episode is about the two women you’re allowed to be in a workplace that was not built for you. The one who shrinks to fit — who gets told she’s too big, too loud, too many ideas, and folds all of it up inside herself, hands her ideas to somebody else so they’ll get heard, stops saying the thing she knows is going to go wrong. And the one who strikes to kill — who was taught there’s only ever room for one of her, so she leaves no space for the next one coming up behind.

They’re the same woman. Same message, two ways out. You are not allowed here, you should feel lucky we let you in, and if you’re uncomfortable with how we do things then you should shut up or leave.

I’ve talked to thousands of women over the last five years who live inside that, and I lived inside it myself. I’m the person who had to hand her idea to the nearest male coworker because it would be taken seriously from him and ignored from me.

All of that is evidence of a problem with the workplace. It is not evidence of a problem with you.

You are not intimidating. They’re intimidated. Nobody is going to make them do the work to find out why you’re such a threat, so you’re going to stay a threat — but you do not have to make yourself smaller to fix something you didn’t break. You’ve been the same person the whole time.

You are not too much. They are not enough.

Plus: breaking news on the semicolon rant, in which four actual English professors turn up to tell me I was right. And an Ask L2 from Kieran, who wants an exemption from the don’t-fight-with-pigs rule for a pig who owes him $4,000.

CHAPTERS

00:00:00 "You are not allowed here"

00:00:23 Welcome to You’re Not Too Much

00:00:37 What always happens when I talk about women at work

00:01:08 Women are allowed to suck, too

00:01:46 I wish you the success of the mediocre white male

00:02:25 Persona one: the woman who shrinks to fit

00:04:13 Persona two: the woman who strikes to kill

00:05:09 Both of those are the same thing

00:06:37 Thousands of women, same paradigm

00:07:57 Give it to your nearest male coworker

00:08:19 A problem with the workplace, not a problem with you

00:08:28 You are not intimidating. They’re intimidated.

00:09:03 What you actually owe a job you need

00:09:44 You are not too much

00:10:04 They are not enough

00:10:57 Do enough to survive, then find a place that doesn’t suck

00:11:05 Ten thousand levers you don’t need to pull

00:11:20 You’ve been the same person the whole time

00:11:55 Your five to nine is better than your nine to five

00:12:03 A toxic waste dump and no hazmat suit

00:12:31 What professionalism actually means

00:12:57 Why the show is now called You’re Not Too Much

00:13:25 Breaking news: the semicolon rant, vindicated

00:15:26 Ask L2 — "This pig owes me $4,000"

00:16:37 You can have whatever tone you want

00:17:15 The strongly worded email

Every episode: https://yourenottoomuchpodcast.com

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I heard the Fed Ex van.

Which means my husband bought something else stupid.

P.S. If you are the household's designated Reasonable Adult — the one doing the mental maths on everybody else's impulse purchases — this is a very short episode to let you know you are very seen.

Right. Semicolons.

There is one rule of semicolons. I wonder if you can guess what that is. I was a journalism major and the first time my professor taught us the situations where a semicolon is appropriate, I put my hand up and told him the only rule is don't. If you disagree you may want to skip this episode. But not before you bite me.

But that's just one of the things we have for this week, friends.

We walked out of the house to go and get french fries and there was a car two houses down that didn't look right. When we tracked the skid marks back to their origin, we quickly found out why.

I'll tell you all about Carlos.

Spoiler alert, this story is not going where you think it is.

Then Ask L2, from Ray: everyone tells him the money's in the room, but the room is two hundred people, a buffet and compulsory eye contact. Is there a version of networking that doesn't involve the room? Grab a pen. I have the lesson plan for you.

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Same show, same me, new name on the door. If your app says You're Not Too Much and you were looking for Different, Not Broken — you're in the right place, nothing has changed except the sign.

There's that saying that all roads lead to Rome. In my life, all roads lead back to my dad.

If there's something annoying I do, it came from him. If there's something good I do, it came from him too. I'm good at business because he was abhorrent at it — I took over his practice at 21 because it was a mess and that is not how you're supposed to do anything. He was also the best doctor I have ever met, and I don't say that because he was my dad. Sometimes those two things don't go together.

August 21st, he will have been gone for ten years. We recorded this two days out.

Here's the thing about ten years. In the first week I remember thinking there was no way we would ever get here — that I could not be a person for a decade without him, that it was structurally impossible. Except I'm here. And I have a ten-year-old who got six weeks with him, and who was six weeks early, which is a level of detail the universe did not have to include and included anyway.

There's an idea that you survive grief. That you get to the other side of it.

There is no other side of grief. It doesn't end. It doesn't stop. Some days it might as well be the day it happened, and some days are worse.

My grief is not smaller. I've just grown around it. The life around him got so much bigger that it takes up less of my brain — but he's still at the middle of it, I still talk about him like he's here, he's still in every decision I make, and he still drives me fricking crazy, which I assume is the job.

I tell you about the drive to get everybody dinner, the first time I'd properly been alone since he died, and asking out loud into an empty car for anything at all. And what was in the text box on my phone when I picked it up again. I didn't type it. I'm not a woo-woo afterlife person. I'm just telling you what was there.

And I leave you with my youngest, who asked what Pop Pop's real name was, found out how Jewish naming works, and reached a conclusion I could not argue with.

Ten years. He hasn't left. Here's to a long time more of missing him.

This one is about my dad, and about grief. If today isn't the day for that, it'll still be here when it is.

🎧 You're Not Too Much — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout and being human.

📞 Leave me a voicemail: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail

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Same feed. Same me. New name.

If you subscribed to Different, Not Broken, you're in the right place and there is nothing for you to do — this show is now called You're Not Too Much, and it lives on the Different, Not Broken Network alongside everything else we're building. Same host, same voicemail line, same everything. Just a name that finally says what the show has always been about.

Now. On to it.

There are extremely good reasons not to start a business. You have a job. You don't want the stress, the minutia, the responsibility. You have a non-compete. You have bills, and in the US you have health insurance to think about. All of that is valid and I am not one of those people who acts like having a job is embarrassing. If you're paying your bills and taking care of your people, you're doing the right thing.

But if the reason you're not betting on yourself is what somebody else might think — that's not a reason.

What other people think about you is not your business. What they say when you're not in the room has nothing to do with you. And in my experience the people who actually matter don't have the time or the calories to hold an opinion about what you're doing that isn't a positive one. If a negative one does turn up, it's a two-second blip and then they've forgotten and gone back to their day.

So the critic you're performing for is imaginary. You built him. Tell him to get bent and get to work.

In this one: why "I don't have the connections" is the easiest problem on the list, why the referrals that actually land come from people nowhere near your industry, the fact that someone less qualified than you is already getting paid to teach the thing you know better, what networking is and very much is not, and my new career in bowling alley maintenance — a field I invented mid-sentence and now urgently need to know about.

Then Ask L2, which is what Small Talk is called now. Deborah writes in: she hired someone to take the admin off her plate and has spent three weeks secretly redoing their work at midnight. Bad boss, or bad delegator?

Not a bad boss. Possibly a bad delegator. There's a difference, it's fixable, and I go through exactly how — including how people successfully manage me, which takes a lot, and the employee I genuinely loved who was in completely the wrong job.

Space expands. Let's fill it.

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Okay. Big news and I want to get the important part out of the way in the first line: nothing you’re subscribed to breaks. Same host, same feed, same weekly nonsense. You don’t have to do anything.

Here’s what’s actually happening.

We’ve been doing this for over a year. In that time, the person who was most resistant to this podcast — a podcast that was, and I cannot stress this enough, her own idea — started building podcasts for other people.

We’re also, apparently, in the top 40 on the Apple charts.

So it's time there’s a network now.

Different, Not Broken becomes the DNB Network — a home for a batch of new shows, all built on the same idea: authoritative people who are also, genuinely, credible. And sometimes freakin' hilarious.

One launches immediately and several are behind it, and you’ll meet those hosts as we bring them in.

And to make room for all of that, this show gets a new name.

We are becoming You’re Not Too Much.

I’m excited and scared and then excited again.

But so many of us have spent our whole lives being told we’re too much — too loud, too direct, too sensitive, too something — and we’re not. You’re not. You’re perfect exactly the way you are. You’re not too much, and you are at the same time enough.

That’s the name. That’s the whole reason for the name.

Same feed. Same host. New stupid stuff, plus all the old stupid stuff. Every week, sometimes more than once.

—

🎧 You’re Not Too Much, a Different, Not Broken podcast — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout and being human.

📞 Leave me a voicemail (Ask L2, brags, fights): https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail

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I broke the sacred Pact of Daughters. I let my mother run out of Equal.

That is the funny half. Here’s the other half.

My mother lives two blocks away, alone. She falls. I don’t let her drive. Her home health company didn’t show up for ten days and neither of them thought to tell me.

On Saturday she sent me to voicemail.

At four in the morning, my husband was standing next to the bed telling me my mother had called him — not me.

So the thing I kept telling myself wouldn’t happen, happened. And I don’t know what we do now.

Raising parents is 1,000 times harder than raising children, and I will die on that hill. And this week's episode is digesting all of this, and wondering what this crazy timeline has lined up for us next.

Then Alison brings a Small Talk from Nada, who raised her rates 40% and needed help with processing that.

But yeah, The sandwich generation is not for the faint of heart.

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My mother has had a serious health issue for six months.

Nobody treated it.

It was in her chart. Six studies confirmed it. Ten doctors saw her this year, and every one of them told her to lose weight.

Here’s the thing. She wasn’t eating. Not “eating less” — not eating, for days at a time, and still gaining weight in places she had never gained weight before. Sleeping all day. Couldn’t walk the way she used to. Couldn’t breathe.

And every appointment ended the same way. Lose weight. Exercise more. You’re getting older.

She could have died. And it would not have been her body’s fault. It would have been someone’s.

I work in healthcare. I know what to look for, I speak the jargon, I know which doors to knock on and whose favour to call in. It still took six months and a twenty-dollar device from Walmart.

So what happens to the woman who doesn’t know any of that?

This one is angry. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

And then Alison brings a Small Talk from Brianna, who wants to know whether her big, loud, takes-up-the-whole-room ADHD joy was ever actually the problem — or whether the problem was just people who couldn’t hold it. That one I had an answer for immediately.

🎧 Different, Not Broken — honest, funny, occasionally furious conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, healthcare and being a person - https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/

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The CEO said something shitty to me at 8:00 in the morning and I resigned by 8:30. There was no plan. There was no thought process. There was just a body that physically could not do it for one more day.

So I called a family member. Someone who owns a business, has owned one for years, who understands small business, who had let me call and cry through every terrible month of that job. In my mind I was talking to exactly the right person.

I told them I didn't think I could go back to work. That I thought I had to find a way to work for myself. That I didn't know what that looked like, but I thought I could do it.

And they said: no. That's a terrible idea.

Every ounce of cobbled-together confidence I'd scraped up in the days since — gone. All the air went out of the universe. What I heard was I don't think you should bet on yourself.

I don't think that's what they meant. But that's what I heard.

This episode is what came after. The consulting company that started completely by accident. The job I took because someone who loved me told me it was what I was supposed to do. The boss who told me "it's not if you get it, it's when" during early COVID, while I was the primary caretaker for my mom, who had just had an organ transplant. The fact that I have spent years remembering that I quit that job when actually — I've just realised — they fired me.

Which is fine, by the way. Getting fired gets a bad rap. Let someone pay you to go away. There is no greater joy in life.

Six years on, I make significantly more than the person who told me not to start my own business. I don't say that to brag. I say it because somebody else's faith in you should not be the thing that decides whether you bet on yourself. Even people who love you will give you bad advice. Even people who know their own business very well might not know yours. Take in opinions. Let them influence your perception. Don't let them make the decision.

Then Alison brings a Small Talk from Tamara in Louisiana, whose son was diagnosed autistic at five. Her mother-in-law said she was letting doctors label him. Her father said she was looking for excuses. Her husband believed it immediately and has been his biggest champion ever since. She asked: how do you love someone who won't do the work of understanding the person you love most?

Don't sit at the table with them.

I have an infinite amount of love and a finite amount of space. The love is awarded whether you want it or not — once I give it to you, I don't take it back. The space is awarded on a merit system, and you have to earn it.

You are worth betting on. I would bet on you. So you should bet on you too.

🎧 Different, Not Broken — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout, and being a person.

📞 Leave me a voicemail — Small Talk, brags, fights: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail

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Learn more: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com

Contains strong language.

I woke up in the middle of the night, checked my phone, and read that Lindsey Graham died. My brain, naturally, read it as Mitch McConnell — because who among us can tell them apart — and from there the whole weekend was just political whiplash.

This one is a tour of the chaos of this timeline. A senator had been missing for almost a month. They said he was "working remotely," and I said, yeah, me too, the only difference is I'm just dead inside. His wife left the country. Contractors were redoing his floors. And I had a lot of questions that nobody was interested in answering, so I did what I do: I made it funny.

Somewhere in there I decided "The Dead Senators" would make an excellent throwback band name (the genre, obviously, is French Regency punk with banjos — a punk rock minuet), I invited everyone to come fight me in our Quirky community, where the Daily Fights have already established that the only acceptable pen is a Pilot V10 in purple and the jury is still out on whether a hot dog is a taco.

And then the part that matters most. A Small Talk from Kristen in North Carolina: "I'm a 38-year-old woman with ADHD, and I look fine. From the inside, I'm running 40 browser tabs, three of which are on fire, and I haven't replied to a text from my sister in 11 days. I want someone to say out loud that looking fine and being fine are not the same thing."

So here it is, out loud: they are not the same thing, and you are allowed to be a put-together human on the outside and a hot mess on the inside. Nobody has it together. Nobody knows what they're doing. We are all raw-dogging life with no guidebook — least of all a guidebook for this exact timeline — and the sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the better.

🎧 Different, Not Broken — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout, and being human.

📞 Leave me a voicemail (small talk, brags, fights): https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail

Learn more: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com

Contains strong language and political commentary.

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