Apparently I have too much energy

On enthusiasm, judgment, and staying fully yourself

I paused for a moment before climbing onto the table.

Not because I didn’t want to. I absolutely did. The music was playing, everyone was dancing, and I wanted to let go and have fun. It was my 50th birthday party after all.

Still, there was a pause.

That tiny moment of “What will people think?”

Then I remembered a guy I play padel with. He’s in his 80s and loves dancing. The first time he told me this, I pictured him elegantly wafting around a ballroom floor.

Boy, was I wrong.

With a fist pump into the air and a twinkle in his eye, he told me he loves trance music. Whenever the duff duff starts playing, he’s the first one dancing, whether it’s at a party or in the middle of the street.

I loved that.

There’s something refreshing about people who stop managing themselves so much.

So, I got up on the table and danced.

What I remember is feeling alive. Smiling down at everyone dancing on the sand below, and them smiling back. Exchanging fist pumps with strangers. Nobody cared how old I was. They just saw a woman having a great time dancing on a table on the beach in Spain.

Last year on my birthday, I did it again. And I already know where I’ll be this year when I turn 52. At the same restaurant on the beach in Spain in July, which is exactly where you should be if you enjoy dancing on the beach in the afternoon sun.

I’ve been thinking about that pause though. Because I don’t think it came from nowhere.

I think it came from old judgments I absorbed and carried around for years.

When I first moved to London, I did some contract work for a tech startup. When the contract ended, they wanted to hire me full-time. The head of the company sat me down and made me an offer.

I was appalled.

The role and salary were incredibly junior. I asked whether he’d actually looked at my CV. Was he aware of my experience and age?

He told me he assumed I was younger because of my energy.

Not because of the work I’d delivered for them. My energy.

I turned down the role. The sensible thing would have been to accept it. I was about to travel for a few months, living off savings, with no income coming in. Having something lined up when I got back would have been the smart move.

But I still couldn’t bring myself to take an offer that was beneath me just because my energy had made me appear more junior. What really stung was that when I corrected him, he didn’t correct himself or the offer. It felt like a double rejection. Not of my work, but of me.

Looking back now, I can see how much that shaped what I showed the world. On several occasions after that, especially in work situations, I found myself toning it down. Trying to appear more measured. Packaged the way people seemed to expect. I was just reinforcing the same dynamics I resented.

I don’t know exactly when that started to shift. Maybe it was the dancing on the table. Maybe it started before that. But somewhere along the way I stopped performing an overly serious version of myself and started showing up as the actual one. And the thing I didn’t expect: the more I’ve owned it, the more I find other people want it.

Here’s the thing about me. I make shit happen. I also happen to like laughing loudly, dancing when good music comes on, and bringing a lot of energy into the things I care about. Apparently, being visibly energetic and being taken seriously are not always considered compatible. Especially for women.

Women are often given a narrow range of acceptable ways to be competent. Don’t be too emotional. Show you can get shit done, but not like that, not with that energy, not laughing that loudly. You’ll come across like a schoolgirl. Be serious enough to be credible, but not so hard that you’re difficult. It’s a very small box to squish yourself into.

And it intensifies as we get older.

There’s this subtle pressure to become more contained over time. More polished. More measured. Less visibly excited by things. Like seriousness is somehow the price of being taken seriously.

A lot of women start editing themselves without fully realising it.

Not in dramatic ways. Just small adjustments. Lowering the energy. Laughing less. Becoming more measured, more contained, more careful about how they come across. Performing a more serious version of themselves until the performance becomes the habit.

I met my husband because I wasn’t doing that.

I was 40 and on my way to running club in Cape Town with a friend, one of those people who brings out your most ridiculous self. As we got close, we started doing the running man down the street like complete goofballs, laughing our asses off and not caring what anyone thought.

Chris told me later that when he saw that, he knew I was ‘the one’. He hadn’t even met me yet.

I’ve thought about that over the years.

How much of life changes depending on whether you shrink yourself or stay open inside it.

Maybe choosing yourself means expressing the parts of you that make you feel most alive. Even if they don’t match how other people expect you to show up.

What parts of yourself have you been hiding away?