What to do when someone rejects you because you are “Too Much”

Have you ever owned an Orchid? 

They are beautiful, glamorous flowers that require special care. You cannot treat an Orchid the way you would treat a Cactus, it would just die. Now, some would call them “high maintenance” but are they? Well, today we would talk about how many of us are just like Orchids. We have been called “too much” and being told we are “high maintenance” so much that we have internalized it and we believe it deeply. Well, before we go into that, here is a storytime on my Orchids. 

I have always loved Orchids and got one a while back, however, I failed to do the right things and it died. So, you see Orchids need just a little bit of water every week to survive, you just need to soak them in for about 15 minutes and they are good for the week. Well, I forgot and it got overwatered and died. 

Now, there are two ways to look at this: one, Orchids are a lot to handle and I cannot even deal with them, and two, I love Orchids so I must be better equipped to care for them the next time I get one. Well, I chose to be the second person and I returned to the florist to get a second plant. I got an Orchid, again, because this glamorous flower called out to me. This time though I was determined to do things differently. 

Well, let us bring this back to people. Sometimes you are an Orchid, you have people who come into your life, tell you how you are “too much” to be with and how you need to calm down and you find yourself believing them. Soon, these people leave you and sometimes you see them in new relationships where they shower this new person with all the love they made you feel “too much” for. You start asking yourself “Why didn’t he fight for me?” The way I cared for my first Orchid and my determination to do better with my second Orchid made me think. 

So, with my orchid, I knew it was already dying; but I didn't think there was anything else I could do. It was already losing its bloom. And since there was nothing else I could do, I made peace with that and I mourned it and forgave myself. I even went on to get another Orchid, and I am investing all the time and resources to give this one a Queenly treatment. 

Now, relate this with people and you being the Orchid. You could have had a partner who was not very hands-on the way you would have expected and when the relationship goes wrong, you see them doing differently with another partner. This can hurt and make you wonder if something was wrong with you. Well, nothing was. You are not too much, they were unwilling to do the right thing the first time around and now they have realized how wrong they were. They “messed up” when it came to you, the way I did with my Orchid, and do not want to mess up again. However, the way you see it is that you have someone who says to you, “oh, you're this, you're too much” and then they reject you because of that. II have noticed that what a lot of women do in this scenario is to internalize these words, accept them as the truth, and to prevent rejection next time they become smaller. They dim their light and they do try to be more amenable. They say to themselves “You know, let me just let me just be OK. I don't want to do too much”. 

Now, I know how this feels because I will say that even for me, I can be a little bit too much. In some ways, I like certain things and I'm willing to try new things. My daughter often says “Do you know you're like you're fifty?” when I wear certain outfits and I would say “Yeah, that's exactly why I'm going to wear whatever I want to wear at this point”. However, not every woman would give the response I gave, some would immediately question their actions saying “Wait is that even right?” and they would dial themselves back. 

Have you done this before? Have you dialed yourself back to be acceptable because somebody told you you were too much, so you started carrying that inside of you and you started dialing yourself down to try and fit in to try and be just OK? Well, let us link this to the tale of my Orchid.

I mentioned that it died because it was a little bit “high maintenance”, and I made a mistake in taking care of it. I love the orchid and I should have done a better job, so it was my fault not the Orchid’s fault. In the same vein, when you have people who always tell you that you are too much, it is not about you. It is the way they have chosen to live that is not a good fit for you. Some people are not going to be good with Orchids, so these people should just really have Cactuses and Succulents that do not require attention to so much detail. These people don't want to do anything. Some people just want wildflowers. 

However, most people would want a beautiful Orchid, they just do not want to do the necessary work; so they resort to telling the Orchid that it is the problem because it is “high maintenance”. However, the Orchid is not the problem! 

I got a replacement Orchid and when I saw her, her bloom said to me “come and get me. I am what you're looking for”. I knew she was going to be much more expensive than my previous Orchid. She had multiple stocks and my last Orchid had just one, so I just knew that I definitely would have to take great care of her because I do want to have to buy it again. 

So, here is what I am trying to say: when you get rejected by someone who wasn't willing to care for the one stock, you don't dial it down. Instead, you dial it up like my beautiful new Orchid and you go all the way. You lean into yourself!

When I work with women, this is the work I do! I help you become your most amazing self. You claim your feminine energy, power, all of that. You step fully into your womanhood and you become everything God has called you to be. And do you know what happens when you do that? You attract someone like myself, just like she attracted me, right. I am willing to make the investment and take such good care of her, I am not going to start nickel and diming and trying to figure out cutting corners. She is like my child now. On the way home, I put her in the passenger seat, not the trunk. I questioned her gently as I was driving and I drove so carefully because I did not want to hurt her. I read up on her because I wanted to be very successful at taking care of her. 

So, you do not want to dial it down, instead you dial it up, because that's when you stop attracting the half-baked people, people who are uninterested in doing the work, unfocused people, people who make these kinds of mistakes. Instead, you start someone willing to put in the work. Someone who sees the value and beauty in the Orchids and loves them. This is not someone who is just trying to manage an orchid. This is not someone who is just any kind of way with it. 

This is the person who is ready to take care of it. The person who gets this says, “Oh my gosh, I can't let it go down”. The person who gets this Orchid understands the standard.  

So, you do your inner work, you do your outer work and you go all the way with who you are. What you do not do is start questioning yourself like, “Oh, my gosh, you know, I'm too much. I'm broken. I'm all that”. 

Listen, if you need to heal, then heal. If you need to go into yourself, I encourage you to do this and ask yourself, “Who am I really without all the programming? Who am I really without me trying to fit into other people? Who am I?”

This is so important because the next person that you're with has to fully appreciate who you are. If you are playing small and you're pulling back, then you're going to attract somebody who again is going to reinforce that. However, if you show up with full flourish like this beautiful Orchid I just bought and placed on my coffee table, then there would be no negotiating your value.

So, when you lean into yourself, when you take care of yourself and I am not talking about just your looks, but also about your purpose, then you are a high-value woman because you understand who you are and who God has made you be. You are of high value because you understand your value and that of everybody else around you. You are of high value because you make people feel loved. After all, some women are so besotted with themselves that when you come around them, you feel worse. That's not high value. 

It does not matter how fancy you look and how many degrees you have. If people feel worse about themselves when they are around you, you have missed the whole plot. Doesn't matter how much scripture you can quote, if people feel bad all the time, if you make them feel less than, if you speak to them condescendingly then you have missed the plot.

However, if you have truly caught on to what it means to be a true feminine powerhouse, a truly high-value woman, then you truly love yourself and you love others because women who truly love themselves would truly love others. When you take care of yourself, you will attract someone who says, oh, let me tell you,  “This woman right here, I have to take care of her. She is worthy of it. I have to just look at how beautiful she is”.

You will attract someone who wants to see your blooms. Like every time I come down here and I look at this plant, I would look and I would be immediately happy. You attract someone who is not threatened by your blooms, but who says “Ye, bloom some more, please. What can I give you to Bloom? What do you need?” 

You'll attract that! I hope this encourages you. The answer is not to be less of yourself. The answer is to be more of who God made you be. You should be so full of the spiritual gifts God has given you. You should be so full of them. And beauty, by the way, is one of your gifts. If you're beautiful, if you're physically attractive, play that up. If your voice is attractive, play that up. You didn't create yourself. It is all in service of honoring the God that made us so we become all that God has asked us to be. You show up! 

If you like me and you like a little whimsy in, then be you and do that to the fullest. It's a lesson I didn't always learn. I didn't always know and I didn't learn it fully right until I started this work, which is why I'm so passionate about it. I wasted a lot of precious time trying to fit into people who honestly, half of them would have given their right arm to have an ounce of what God has given me. A lot of people who are putting you down would give anything to have what you have and to be who you are. They are telling you you are too much because they would give anything to have your hips. They would give anything to have your lips. They would give anything. However, they don't say that instead, they put you down. That man that's telling you “you're this and you're that and you're the other” is threatened by it. So your work is to figure out who God has called you to be, to figure out why you are on this earth. Because I fully believe in purpose, because anything without purpose is bound to be abused. It also is bound to be ornamental and a lot of women become ornamental. They just think, “oh, I'm beautiful and I should be taking care of”. I don't subscribe to that. I do believe that you should be taken care of and you will take care of your partner, but you are here for a purpose. You should be purposeful. So you have a purpose partner because all of us are purposeful. We're here for a reason. God created using us fearfully and wonderfully with intention, and for a reason. He said, “Before you were in your mother's womb, I knew you and I had a plan to prosper you. I have appointed you a prophet to the nations”. You have been given something to do! And he did not say that just to men, it is for all of us!  He said he will pour out His spirit on all flesh, and this reinforces that you have a purpose. And when you are doing that and you're doing it the way God made you you would fully see your value. 

So, if you're that person who likes to preach in a fierce white, then you do that. If you are more the monk type, that's you. There's a message for everybody. God knows how to meet every one of us. So I just want to encourage you. Don't be less. Be more. 

Find the Live where I go into a lot more detail here. Find my podcast episode on this topic here.

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God bless you!