When the Church Says You’re Too Much — and the Basement Says Welcome Home

There is a specific kind of heartbreak reserved for people who were told their soul was “too much.”

Too loud.
Too emotional.
Too queer.
Too questioning.
Too sexual.
Too angry.
Too soft.
Too honest.
Too wounded.
Too unholy.

Churches have a way of preaching love while quietly sorting people into categories: the acceptable and the inconvenient.
And if you’re reading this, you probably learned early on which group you belonged to.

I used to think being “too much” was a flaw — a spiritual defect, a weakness, a reminder that I didn’t fit the mold everyone else seemed to slide into so easily. I spent years sanding myself down, praying the parts of me that made people uncomfortable would simply… disappear.

Spoiler alert: they never did.

No amount of repentance quieted my queerness.
No amount of “forgive me Father” untangled my trauma.
No amount of purity culture rewired my desire.
No amount of shame therapy made me small enough to be holy.

And somewhere between the confession booth and the relapse, between the altar call and the sexual awakening, between the trauma and the truth — I realized something no sermon had ever prepared me for:

There’s nothing wrong with being too much.
There’s everything wrong with being told to be less.

The church wasn’t rejecting my flaws.
It was rejecting my fullness.

There’s a difference.

Because the things they told me were “too much”?
Those were the things that saved me.

My intensity meant I loved deeply.
My softness meant I empathized fiercely.
My anger meant I recognized injustice.
My questions meant my spirit was alive.
My desire meant my body wasn’t a battlefield.
My queerness meant I knew freedom in my bones.
My grief meant I had survived hell and kept my heart open.

Too much was never the problem.
It was the power.

And institutions don’t like people who don’t fit neatly into their doctrine.
But the basement?
The basement was built for it.

The basement is a sanctuary for the too much, the too loud, the too complicated, the too queer, the too hurt, the too human.

Here, your contradictions are holy.
Your emotions are allowed to spill.
Your history doesn’t make you unclean.
Your body is not a sermon illustration.
Your desire isn’t a curse.
Your questions aren’t rebellion — they’re resurrection.

This space is for the ones who don’t fit in pews because their souls don’t bend that way.

You don’t have to be palatable here.
You don’t have to shrink to make space for anyone else’s comfort.
You don’t have to hide the parts of you that would’ve gotten you side-eyed during worship.

In the basement, “too much” is a compliment.

It means you survived.
It means you feel.
It means you still want something bigger than silence.
means the world hasn’t managed to flatten you into something safe and forgettable.

You are not too much, babe.
You’re everything.
And you’re finally somewhere that recognizes it.

— Beverly, patron saint of the unpalatable