Too Much, He Called It

There is a piece of feedback that is not feedback at all, and almost everybody who receives it treats it as though it were.

You are a bit much.

Picture the woman who was told it. She was not told it in a review. It came in a corridor, half joking, from a manager, after a meeting in which she had been enthusiastic about something and had, in his words, taken up a lot of the room.

She laughed. Of course she laughed. And then she thought about it for eleven months.

And what she did with it is the thing worth examining, because it was very deliberate and very quiet. She started measuring herself before rooms. She began asking one question before she said anything: is this going to be too much?

She stopped bringing ideas in with any energy in them, because energy was clearly the part that had been objected to. She started apologizing after speaking, with a small self deprecating line, so that nobody would have to think it. She stopped laughing loudly. She sat differently.

And it worked, in the sense that nobody has said it again.

But here is what nobody in that building knows. The thing he called too much is the thing she is best at. It is why the team she used to run had the numbers it had. It is why two people who used to work for her still call her when they are stuck. Her warmth and her volume are not a personality problem sitting next to her competence. They are the delivery system for it.

So the correction did not remove a flaw. It removed the engine, and it left a quieter and more acceptable woman who is now, by every measure, worse at her job.

The prophet was measuring wrong

There is a scene in Samuel where a prophet is choosing a king, and he gets it wrong immediately, and the correction he receives is not about the candidate.

He looks at the eldest son, who is tall and impressive, and concludes this must be the one. And God stops him.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7, King James Version)

Read who is being corrected. Not Eliab. Samuel.

The problem in that story is not the son who was too tall or the son who was too young. The problem is the measuring instrument, which is described as a standing human limitation rather than as one prophet's bad day.

You have been measured by an instrument that Scripture openly calls limited, and 1 Samuel 16 says man looketh on the outward appearance as a general statement about people (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the seeing that the corridor could not do.

And notice that God does not defend Eliab or explain what was wrong with him. He simply moves the question to a different measurement entirely. The verdict is not overturned by argument. It is made irrelevant by jurisdiction.

You are being assessed in a court that does not use his scale, and 1 Samuel 16:7 sets the LORD looking on the heart against man looking on the appearance, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a working fact for somebody who has been shrinking for eleven months.

Made on purpose, at this size

There is a line in the psalms about how a person was put together, and the wording is oddly industrial.

My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. (Psalm 139:15)

Curiously wrought. In older English that means intricately worked, like embroidery or metalwork. It describes deliberate craftsmanship with attention to detail.

Which is a strange thing to say about somebody who has spent a year believing that one of her main features is an error.

You were intricately worked rather than roughly assembled, and Psalm 139 uses the language of skilled craftsmanship about how a person was made (Psalm 139:15), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient word about embroidery and applies it to a woman apologizing after every sentence.

And there is a sentence in Ephesians that is even more direct about it, and people usually stop reading it halfway.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10)

His workmanship. The Greek word behind it is the one we get poem from. And then it says what the workmanship is for: good works, prepared in advance.

Which means the features were fitted to the work. Warmth was not an accident that got in alongside the competence. It was issued with it.

You have been fitted for the work you are actually doing, and Ephesians 2 calls a person His workmanship and then names what it was prepared for (Ephesians 2:10), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person from filing off the very thing they were given.

What this is not

Let me draw the line carefully, because this could become an excuse.

This is not saying that nobody should ever change anything about how they come across. Some feedback about manner is fair and useful, and there are rooms where reading the temperature is a kindness rather than a compromise.

It is also not telling anybody to confront him about it. It arrived as a half joke in a corridor, which makes it almost impossible to raise, and this article cannot see what raising it would cost.

And it is certainly not an instruction to be louder as a protest. That is a reaction to the same man, and it would cost her more than it costs him.

And plainly: if the shrinking has gone past work, if you have begun to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with you, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has started wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a corridor. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Asking for help has never been weakness.

You are not being told to prove a point in front of anybody, and 1 Samuel 16 answers a wrong measurement by changing the instrument rather than by staging an argument (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold the difference between honest adjustment and self erasure.