Why you’re not too emotional and how to stop suppressing your feelings
There’s a sentence most women know by heart. Not because we believe it, but because we’ve heard it too many times.
You’re too emotional. You’re overreacting. Oh come on, get a grip.
And at some point, almost without noticing, we start saying it to ourselves. We feel something rise, sadness, anger, tenderness, joy that’s a little too big, and immediately something else comes in to contain it. Not now. Not like this. Not that much.
But what if the problem was never your emotions, only the way you were taught to relate to them?
Close your eyes for a second.
Think of the last time you felt something strongly and immediately told yourself it was too much.
Too sensitive.
Too dramatic.
Too intense.
Notice what happened in your body in that moment.
The tightening. The holding. The subtle shutting down.
That right there.
That is the learned response.
Earlier this year, I asked a group of women what “TooMuch” meant for them. The answer came back again and again. Too emotional. Not too loud, not too ambitious, not too wild. Too emotional.
So let’s start here. Emotions are not flaws in the system. They are the system. Energy in motion. They are not here to be solved, fixed, or silenced. They are here to move. And what is meant to move becomes overwhelming only when it is held in place.
We’ve learned to distrust that movement. To label some emotions as acceptable and others as inconvenient, messy, inappropriate. Crying over a film is too much. Feeling deeply affected by something small is too much. Taking something personally is definitely too much. So we tighten. We intellectualise. We minimise. We explain ourselves out of what we feel. We try to become reasonable, which often means less felt, more contained.
But here is the quiet truth. You are not inconsistent. You are layered.
There is a part of you that already knows this.
The part that feels before it explains.
That moves before it asks for permission.
That doesn’t negotiate its truth to remain palatable.
This is not the part you were taught to trust.
But it is the one that has always been accurate.
This is Artemis energy.
Not softening to be accepted.
Not shrinking to be understood.
But standing in what is felt, fully, quietly, without apology.
Different parts of you respond to life in different ways.
Not because you are unstable, but because you are alive to more than one truth at a time.
And no one ever taught you how to hold that without making it a problem.
You are not too much. You are responding. To life. To memory. To subtle shifts no one taught you to name.
And yes, sometimes it feels like a lot. Because most of us were never taught how to be with our emotions once they arise. Only how to suppress them or how to explode with them. Nothing in between.
But there is another way. You can feel without drowning. You can allow without collapsing. You can witness what moves through you without turning it into your identity or throwing it onto someone else.
I cry when I’m sad. Not performatively, not apologetically. Just because sadness is moving through me. I have learned not to interrupt that movement. I live through my emotions. They live through me. And then they pass, like waves do.
That’s the part we forget. Emotions are not permanent states. They are experiences. They rise, they peak, they move on. Even joy.
What creates chaos is not the emotion itself. It’s the resistance to it. The judging, the silencing, the holding. That is when pressure builds. That is when things spill over. That is when we become, in fact, too much, not because we feel, but because we haven’t been allowed to feel along the way.
And just to be clear, feeling everything does not mean throwing everything at others. I don’t suppress my emotions and I don’t weaponise them either. I scream in the forest, not at people. I ask for comfort when I need it. I keep some things sacred, quiet, my own. Expression is a choice. But the feeling itself is not.
So no, there is no such thing as too emotional. There are only emotions that were never allowed to move.
And if someone is uncomfortable with your depth, your tears, your fire, your joy that spills a little over the edges, you can let that belong to them. Not everything you feel is meant to be understood by everyone.
As for you, you don’t need to get a grip. You might just need to let go.
And if, after years of holding yourself together, everything now feels bigger, louder, harder to navigate, that doesn’t mean something is wrong. It means something is opening. And learning how to move with that matters.
If you feel called to explore this, not by fixing yourself but by learning how to be with yourself differently, I offer a few spaces for Living a Goddess Life.
Five days in nature. A small circle of women. A return to your body, your rhythm, your instinct.
Not becoming someone else. Just no longer holding yourself back.
If you feel the pull, you can explore it here:https://isayabelle.com/lagl.initiation
Until then, feel. Let it move. And breathe.
This is Artemis. Not asking you to be less, only to be fully, unapologetically yourself.
If you know a sister, a friend, a fellow Goddess on the path who might need this too, feel free to share this article with her.
In sisterhood,
Isaya