How I Learned My "Too Much" Was Exactly Enough

A love letter to my fellow "over-emotional" writers

Amanda Saint

was one of the first people I admired on Substack when I joined back in November 2023. I told my husband “this woman has a whole career of teaching writing on Substack…it’s amazing!”

. . . and I was totally jealous . . .

Now, Amanda is one of my favorite people on Substack, and a friend I text with on WhatsApp several times a week. We’ve guest presented on each other’s programs, and I can easily say her teaching is 100% in line with EVERYTHING I know and believe. She is a sensitive soul who has reconciled her sensitivities through her writing. And now she facilitates small group programs guiding other sensitive souls to reconcile their “too muchness” through their writing.

It is an honor to host her here on The MindfulSense Mentor🧚.
I hope you find her insight as inspiring, amusing, and wonder-filled as I do. ~TeriLeigh

There are moments that divide your writing life into before and after. Mine came in early 2010 during my first “serious” writing class, when I was finally brave enough to try writing a novel, something I’d wanted to do since I was a child. The protagonist had been in my head for months urging me to get on with writing her story. So I finally booked a course.

There were around 12 of us in the class and each week one person got to read a 1500-word extract for feedback from the tutor and the rest of the group. My week came about half-way through the 6-week course. I couldn't eat breakfast. Or lunch. My stomach was churning in terror.

When the moment came, I hid behind the paper held in my trembling hands, as if somehow that would make it easier. It didn’t. My voice shook so badly I could barely recognise it as my own. But I read every word, my heart hammering in my ears.

Then came the feedback. And when you're a sensitive writer, initially the feedback you get doesn't feel like craft critique. It feels like someone dissecting you, your soul, and finding it all wanting. The comments I got in that class felt like personal attacks. It took all I had to not cry as I sat there and everyone told me what they felt was wrong with what I’d written. How lacking in depth and emotion it was. I went home and questioned everything — my writing, my desire to do it, who I was as a person.

Growing Up as "The Over-Emotional One"

I grew up in a family where my feelings were labeled as inconvenient, dramatic, excessive. I learned early that the safest thing to do was to tone myself down, apologise for feeling deeply, or just pretend to not feel at all.

The only emotions my family were comfortable displaying were anger and judgment and they were deeply uncomfortable with the depth of emotion and care for the world and everyone and everything in it that I carried. So I learned to never share my feelings.

When I became a journalist and then a corporate communications consultant, this training served me well. It was easy to strip emotion from my writing, to adopt a "professional" voice and for years, I wrote without feeling. Clean, clear sentences that said nothing about the human experience. I wrote articles that informed but never moved anyone, including me.

And when I tried to write fiction, this lifelong conditioning of suppressing my real feelings kept me from really pouring the emotion that fiction needs onto the page.

The Teacher Who Changed Everything

But then I found another teacher. Someone who taught me to mine my emotions, not keep them buried deep.

After I sent him a short story for feedback, yet another one where the emotions were absent and the characters pretty lifeless, he gave me an assignment on our next Skype session: "Write for 10 minutes about a moment when you were truly terrified."

Everything in me resisted. I'd spent my whole life learning not to go too deep, not to feel too much. But something about his gentle but uncompromising approach made me trust the process. Trust him.

The writing that poured out was raw, vulnerable, unfiltered. It was everything I'd been taught to hide.

When I read it to him he clapped and said it was the best thing I’d ever written since I started coming to his classes. He showed me that my greatest fears, deepest joys, and most intense moments weren't obstacles to good writing but where good writing comes from. That there were readers who would love my too muchness. That people who also feel things deeply, love it when people write with the intensity they carried in their own hearts.

Unlearning a Lifetime of "Too Much"

The work of truly unlearning to suppress my emotions took years in the real world but on the page, everything was different after that class when he clapped. I sat and I tapped into the characters and all they were going through and how that felt in my body and I just let it all flow. The difference between my journalism voice and my fiction voice became stark.

That teacher gave me something my family never had: permission to be fully myself, feelings and all. The relief of discovering that my "over-emotional" nature wasn't a character flaw but my creative superpower changed everything for me.

What I Discovered About My "Too Much"

My new emotional freedom in my writing meant that the novel that emerged was unlike anything I'd written before. All those short stories that were stilted and completely lacking in resonance felt like they had been written by a different person.

It took me six years to write, edit and get that novel published and even though I was absolutely terrified when it was finally out there for people to read and review, I also felt proud of what I’d achieved.

One day, reading a review someone left on Amazon (which I did obsessively when my first novel was published and is a whole other story!), I came across this sentence: "Amanda Saint understands emotions, her characters are raw and real."

I cried when I read that. Because I realised I'd always understood emotions, I'd just been taught to pretend I didn't have any.

Writing from my emotional truth enabled me to write better stories and characters that felt real, and it healed the years of being told I was too sensitive, too dramatic, too much.

This shaped everything that came after. I realised I needed writing communities that celebrated sensitivity, teachers who understood that vulnerability was strength, processes that supported rather than suppressed emotional truth.

It's why I now create different kinds of spaces for writers — gentle containers like the Year of Mindful Writing, where we work with people like TeriLeigh who understand that our nervous systems need different kinds of creative support.

It's why I believe so fiercely in mindful writing practices that honour both the writer's wellbeing and the story's truth.

A Love Letter to My Fellow "Over-Emotional" Writers

If you grew up being told you were too much, I want you to know this: the world doesn't need you to be less. It needs you to be fearlessly, authentically you.

The people that told us we were "over-emotional" were afraid of feeling. Their comfort with numbness doesn't make it right for us.

The stories waiting in your "too much" are the ones the world needs most. There's a direct correlation between emotional courage and literary power. The writers who move us most are the ones who aren't afraid to feel everything.

I'm no longer that shaky-voiced woman hiding behind her manuscript. Learning to honour my sensitivity transformed not just my writing, but my entire relationship with myself and others. Every day, I now choose emotional truth over emotional safety. It's always a choice, and it's always worth making.

Because what I learned in that writing class changed everything: my "too much" was exactly enough and it always had been.

If this resonates with you, you might love the gentle, supportive approach we take in the Year of Mindful Writing. We believe your sensitivity is your strength, and we're here to help you write from that place of authentic power.

In 2026, Amanda and I are collaborating on a number of ventures together. I will be leading five workshops as part of her Year of Mindful Writing, and she will be offering monthly workshops as part of The Creator Retreat.