You're Not Too Much

Right. Semicolons.
There is one rule of semicolons. I wonder if you can guess what that is. I was a journalism major and the first time my professor taught us the situations where a semicolon is appropriate, I put my hand up and told him the only rule is don't. If you disagree you may want to skip this episode. But not before you bite me.
But that's just one of the things we have for this week, friends.
We walked out of the house to go and get french fries and there was a car two houses down that didn't look right. When we tracked the skid marks back to their origin, we quickly found out why.
I'll tell you all about Carlos.
Spoiler alert, this story is not going where you think it is.
Then Ask L2, from Ray: everyone tells him the money's in the room, but the room is two hundred people, a buffet and compulsory eye contact. Is there a version of networking that doesn't involve the room? Grab a pen. I have the lesson plan for you.
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Same show, same me, new name on the door. If your app says You're Not Too Much and you were looking for Different, Not Broken — you're in the right place, nothing has changed except the sign.
There's that saying that all roads lead to Rome. In my life, all roads lead back to my dad.
If there's something annoying I do, it came from him. If there's something good I do, it came from him too. I'm good at business because he was abhorrent at it — I took over his practice at 21 because it was a mess and that is not how you're supposed to do anything. He was also the best doctor I have ever met, and I don't say that because he was my dad. Sometimes those two things don't go together.
August 21st, he will have been gone for ten years. We recorded this two days out.
Here's the thing about ten years. In the first week I remember thinking there was no way we would ever get here — that I could not be a person for a decade without him, that it was structurally impossible. Except I'm here. And I have a ten-year-old who got six weeks with him, and who was six weeks early, which is a level of detail the universe did not have to include and included anyway.
There's an idea that you survive grief. That you get to the other side of it.
There is no other side of grief. It doesn't end. It doesn't stop. Some days it might as well be the day it happened, and some days are worse.
My grief is not smaller. I've just grown around it. The life around him got so much bigger that it takes up less of my brain — but he's still at the middle of it, I still talk about him like he's here, he's still in every decision I make, and he still drives me fricking crazy, which I assume is the job.
I tell you about the drive to get everybody dinner, the first time I'd properly been alone since he died, and asking out loud into an empty car for anything at all. And what was in the text box on my phone when I picked it up again. I didn't type it. I'm not a woo-woo afterlife person. I'm just telling you what was there.
And I leave you with my youngest, who asked what Pop Pop's real name was, found out how Jewish naming works, and reached a conclusion I could not argue with.
Ten years. He hasn't left. Here's to a long time more of missing him.
This one is about my dad, and about grief. If today isn't the day for that, it'll still be here when it is.
🎧 You're Not Too Much — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout and being human.
📞 Leave me a voicemail: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail
💬 Come hang out with the rest of us in the Quirky community (it's free): https://alwaysquirky.com
🌐 Everything else: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com

Same feed. Same me. New name.
If you subscribed to Different, Not Broken, you're in the right place and there is nothing for you to do — this show is now called You're Not Too Much, and it lives on the Different, Not Broken Network alongside everything else we're building. Same host, same voicemail line, same everything. Just a name that finally says what the show has always been about.
Now. On to it.
There are extremely good reasons not to start a business. You have a job. You don't want the stress, the minutia, the responsibility. You have a non-compete. You have bills, and in the US you have health insurance to think about. All of that is valid and I am not one of those people who acts like having a job is embarrassing. If you're paying your bills and taking care of your people, you're doing the right thing.
But if the reason you're not betting on yourself is what somebody else might think — that's not a reason.
What other people think about you is not your business. What they say when you're not in the room has nothing to do with you. And in my experience the people who actually matter don't have the time or the calories to hold an opinion about what you're doing that isn't a positive one. If a negative one does turn up, it's a two-second blip and then they've forgotten and gone back to their day.
So the critic you're performing for is imaginary. You built him. Tell him to get bent and get to work.
In this one: why "I don't have the connections" is the easiest problem on the list, why the referrals that actually land come from people nowhere near your industry, the fact that someone less qualified than you is already getting paid to teach the thing you know better, what networking is and very much is not, and my new career in bowling alley maintenance — a field I invented mid-sentence and now urgently need to know about.
Then Ask L2, which is what Small Talk is called now. Deborah writes in: she hired someone to take the admin off her plate and has spent three weeks secretly redoing their work at midnight. Bad boss, or bad delegator?
Not a bad boss. Possibly a bad delegator. There's a difference, it's fixable, and I go through exactly how — including how people successfully manage me, which takes a lot, and the employee I genuinely loved who was in completely the wrong job.
Space expands. Let's fill it.

— Voicemail line — Ask L2, brags, fights: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail
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Okay. Big news and I want to get the important part out of the way in the first line: nothing you’re subscribed to breaks. Same host, same feed, same weekly nonsense. You don’t have to do anything.
Here’s what’s actually happening.
We’ve been doing this for over a year. In that time, the person who was most resistant to this podcast — a podcast that was, and I cannot stress this enough, her own idea — started building podcasts for other people.
We’re also, apparently, in the top 40 on the Apple charts.
So it's time there’s a network now.
Different, Not Broken becomes the DNB Network — a home for a batch of new shows, all built on the same idea: authoritative people who are also, genuinely, credible. And sometimes freakin' hilarious.
One launches immediately and several are behind it, and you’ll meet those hosts as we bring them in.
And to make room for all of that, this show gets a new name.
We are becoming You’re Not Too Much.
I’m excited and scared and then excited again.
But so many of us have spent our whole lives being told we’re too much — too loud, too direct, too sensitive, too something — and we’re not. You’re not. You’re perfect exactly the way you are. You’re not too much, and you are at the same time enough.
That’s the name. That’s the whole reason for the name.
Same feed. Same host. New stupid stuff, plus all the old stupid stuff. Every week, sometimes more than once.
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🎧 You’re Not Too Much, a Different, Not Broken podcast — honest, funny conversations about neurodivergence, mental health, burnout and being human.
📞 Leave me a voicemail (Ask L2, brags, fights): https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com/voicemail
💬 Come fight me in the Quirky community (it’s free): https://alwaysquirky.com
🌐 Everything else: https://differentnotbrokenpodcast.com

I broke the sacred Pact of Daughters. I let my mother run out of Equal.
That is the funny half. Here’s the other half.
My mother lives two blocks away, alone. She falls. I don’t let her drive. Her home health company didn’t show up for ten days and neither of them thought to tell me.
On Saturday she sent me to voicemail.
At four in the morning, my husband was standing next to the bed telling me my mother had called him — not me.
So the thing I kept telling myself wouldn’t happen, happened. And I don’t know what we do now.
Raising parents is 1,000 times harder than raising children, and I will die on that hill. And this week's episode is digesting all of this, and wondering what this crazy timeline has lined up for us next.
Then Alison brings a Small Talk from Nada, who raised her rates 40% and needed help with processing that.
But yeah, The sandwich generation is not for the faint of heart.

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