Too Much Is Exactly Enough
Hello, hello! Hiiiii! It’s your friend Spicy Sal!
Too loud. Too dramatic. Too emotional. Too gay. Too sparkly. Too much.
If you’ve ever heard any version of that sentence, pull up a chair, honey. This post is for you. So is my whole series.
Where “too much” comes from (for me)
I grew up in a first-generation Italian household where the expectations were louder than Sunday dinner. I was different from the start, and I figured out pretty early that “too much” was not a compliment. So I did what a lot of us do. I tried to shrink.
It didn’t work. As I wrote at the end of Book 1:
“The more I tried to shrink myself, the more I suffocated, and darling, suffocating isn’t living.”
That’s the real reason Spicyville exists. In the foreword to Spicy Sal and the Duplex of Drama, I put it like this: “Growing up, I didn’t always feel like I belonged. That’s why I built this world, because I wish I had one like it when I was younger.” I wanted a place where different isn’t a flaw, it’s a superpower. A place where being too much is exactly enough.
A whole street full of “too much”
Every main character in Book 1 is wrestling with some version of the same label, just from different directions.
•Spicy Sal is pure sequins and confidence. But as the book says on page one, “Confidence wasn’t something Sal practiced. It was something he wore.”
•Samantha turns the volume all the way up. She throws the parties, wears the outfits and chases the spotlight, “like if she sparkled hard enough, she’d finally belong.”
•Patty, her identical twin, has the opposite problem. She makes herself small, bakes for everybody and whispers her affirmations in the bathroom mirror until she can finally say them out loud.
•Ridnaj, the quiet handyman, isn’t worried about being too much. He’s worried he’s not enough.
•And Cocoa, my royal Cockapoo queen in her slightly tilted tiara, is the one who tells him the truth: “Honey. You are absolutely enough.”
Patty, practising the words until she believes them.
Writing them taught me something. “Too much” and “not enough” are the same wound wearing different outfits. Both come from feeling like the real you won’t be welcome.
Fitting in is not the same as belonging
Researcher Brené Brown draws a line between the two that I think about all the time. Fitting in, she says, is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be to be accepted. Belonging is the opposite: it doesn’t require us to change who we are, “it requires us to be who we are.”
Samantha spends most of Book 1 trying to fit in. She desperately wants into the #SpicyMeanBhitches, the little group Sal started for people who never quite fit anywhere. It “was built for people who had been dimmed, and decided to shine brighter anyway.” But you can’t perform your way into belonging.
And to be clear, “too much is exactly enough” isn’t a free pass to steamroll everyone around you. When Samantha asks Sal if he wants her to shrink and be quiet like her sister, he tells her, “I want you to be kind.” As the book puts it, sometimes fire lights a room, and sometimes it burns the house down. Being fully yourself and making room for other people can, and should, happen at the same time.
Why found family matters
Found family isn’t just a cozy book trope. For a lot of queer people, it’s survival.
The Trevor Project’s 2024 national survey of LGBTQ+ young people in the U.S. found that only 40% said their home was an LGBTQ+-affirming space. Online spaces were the most common affirming space, at 68%. When home doesn’t feel safe, people go looking for somewhere that does.
Researchers at Cornell’s PRYDE program, who work with LGBTQ+ youth facing family rejection, describe chosen family as “not a ‘backup’ family—it’s a lifeline that provides survival, joy, and belonging.”
That’s the Duplex. Sal says it best in Book 1:
“People like us weren’t always allowed stability. Or ownership. Or safety. So when we build it for ourselves, it matters.”
Can a funny book actually help?
I’m not going to pretend a glitter-soaked comedy fixes the world. But stories do something real. A 2015 study in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reading the Harry Potter books improved young readers’ attitudes toward stigmatized groups, and the researchers linked it to perspective-taking: spending time inside someone else’s experience.
I’m not comparing myself to Harry Potter, darling (yet). But I believe in what that research points to. When you laugh with a character, root for them and cry a little when they finally get it right, it gets a lot harder to dismiss people like them in real life. And if you are people like them, it feels really good to see yourself as the hero for once.
You are not too much
By the end of Book 1, at the big Roast & Toast, Sal finally says the thing he’s been carrying his whole life:
“When I was little, I thought I had to shrink myself. I thought being too much meant I wasn’t enough.”
Spoiler-free answer? It didn’t. It never did. Too much joy, too much love, too much glitter, too much truth: that’s exactly what saves you.
So here’s my wish for you, the same one I wrote at the back of the book: stop dimming, stop apologizing, stop trying to be beige when you were born a fabulous rainbow. The world doesn’t need another copy and paste. The world needs you.
There’s room for you here.
Stay spicy,
Spicy Sal
Sources
•Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden. Quoted in Jacobsen, W., “Belonging or Fitting In”, Goodreads, 2013.
•The Trevor Project. (2024). 2024 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People.
•Iwasko, J. (2025, December 9). “Our People, Our Stories: Lessons on Chosen Family from LGBTQ+ Youth.” PRYDE, Cornell University.
•Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D., & Trifiletti, E. (2015). The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45, 105–121.
•Spicy Sal. Spicy Sal and the Duplex of Drama (3rd ed.). Spicy Academy, 2026.
