Carly Rae Jepsen’s Music Helped Me Stop Apologizing for Being “Too Much”

There is something freeing about being in a ballroom full of people singing about how we all deserve to feel a love that reverberates through the walls of our body.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s album Emotion came out the same year I was in my first adult relationship, when I’d started dating a man I’ll call Aiden. He was hard to pin down. When we’d grow closer, he would freak out and pull away, deleting his social media and refusing to answer texts or phone calls, acting like I was too demanding for wanting to talk. But instead of asking why I was with someone who made me chase them, I blamed myself for pushing him away.

On the commute to his apartment, I’d sing along to “Gimmie Love” in the highest pitch, strongly relating to the lyrics and the questions Carly asked. On the subway platform, I would belt, “Gimmie love, gimmie love, gimmie love, gimmie love. Gimmie touch. ’Cause I want what I want, do you think that I want too much?” While at the time I thought I just liked the lyrics, the truth is that it’s exactly the way Aiden made me feel: like I had to beg for love, and then question if I was asking for too much in the first place. But this wasn’t a new development. It had been a pattern in my relationships for my whole life.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother yelling at me for crying too much and being too loud while doing it—early on, I internalized the lesson that openly expressing how I felt was unwelcome. Growing up in an unsupportive and abusive environment, I stifled myself, always worrying I would be a burden to others. I spent so much of my life bottled up that by the time I got to high school, I was overzealous about getting close to people. I joined theater and auditioned for the school play—joined every club I could think of, asked everyone questions, and tried to impress people in hopes that I’d find some sense of normalcy and friendship.

And when I developed a crush on someone I’ll call Beck, who also seemed to have a well of emotions and difficult experiences they pulled from, I didn’t hold back. I laughed loudly at their jokes, texted them often, told them how much I liked their music, and was open about my feelings. We seemed to have a lot in common. They laughed at most of my jokes, which I took to mean they at least liked being friends. And for all I knew from their behavior, they could have reciprocated my crush.

But after months of friendship, Beck rejected me through their sister—they’d told her I was “too much.” After that, they started actively avoiding me, and made cruel comments when we were around our mutual friends. I was convinced I had done something so wrong that I deserved to be treated this poorly.

Later that year, I was sexually assaulted by Beck’s best friend, and put in a horrible position because they knew I wanted to be liked. I kept quiet, mostly out of the need to not be thought of as “too much.” If I was too much when I showed someone my affection, I thought, that must mean I would also be too much for not wanting it when I got attention.

When, more than a year later, Beck apologized for how they’d treated me and told me they wanted a friendship, we became close. Throughout our friendship during high school, though I didn’t recognize it then, they still had the upper hand. I hid or actively avoided parts of me that I thought they wouldn’t like. I didn’t want to give them any reason to pull away from me again.

So when I first fell in love with Carly Rae Jepsen’s music, I did so in secret. Beck didn’t like pop. They didn’t think it was “real music.” So they never would have approved of how much I loved Carly’s first single, “Call Me Maybe,” which came out toward the end of high school. Still, I blasted it from my headphones any chance I got. Carly’s confident tone, her ability to make the first move, and her daring to sing a song about it, made me feel in control—like I, once again, had the power to like someone openly without feeling ashamed.

Alone at home, I paraded around my bathroom and leapt from counter to bathtub scream-singing, “Here’s my number, so call me maybe,” pointing at myself in the mirror and pretending I was in my own music video where it didn’t matter if I was too much: That was the point. Through “Call Me Maybe,” I found joy in the extreme emotions I felt and could sing along to. I found the deep belief that I deserve to be confident about who I am.

But whenever I was with Beck, I was still worried about showing the wrong parts of myself for fear of abandonment, unable to see that I could just walk away from someone who made me feel that way.

*

Several years after high school, Emotion was the album that would help me realize I had never been asking for too much, and I shouldn’t have to beg for someone to give me basic affirmation and affection. When I really listened to myself singing the lyrics to “Gimmie Love,” I thought about how sad it sounded, and what I deserved for the answer to the question to be.

After years of being together, I remember sitting at our favorite burger place while Aiden talked about how uncomfortable he was with my increasingly radical politics and journalism.

Through “Call Me Maybe,” I found joy in the extreme emotions I felt and could sing along to. I found the deep belief that I deserve to be confident about who I am. 

“Do you want to be with me as I am, as I keep evolving?” I asked. “I need you to tell me now. Because if I’m too much for you now, I’m always going to be too much for you.” I didn’t want him to answer the question. I already knew the answer. But despite my bold proclamations, I held on for another few months. At the time I didn’t know why I stayed, but looking back, I see that I was stuck in the same pattern that started when I was younger: trying to prove to someone I loved that I was worthy of the same, even if it meant making myself smaller.

It was only when I re-listened to “When I Needed You” by Carly in the immediate aftermath of that breakup that I realized how imbalanced most of my relationships had been. I would scream-sing the lyrics for months after—until something changed in the way I thought about love: “Sometimes I wish that I could change but not for me, for you so we could be together, forever, but I know, I know that I won’t change for you ‘cause where were you for me when I needed someone?”

Suddenly, I realized how unfair it was to try to pretzel myself into the shape someone else needed when they weren’t ever being what I needed, when they didn’t want me as I am, anyway. In Carly’s choice not to change for someone who wasn’t what she needed in the first place, I also found the same defiance and self-love.

*

My love for Carly’s music only grew, but it wasn’t just pop music to me anymore—by the time I listened to her newest album Dedicated last year, a dispatch from the other side of heartbreak, I felt Carly was a friend telling me how people she’s loved have failed her and asking me to ask for more for myself.

At my first Carly concert last summer, I shouted along as she sang “The Sound:” “I don’t think I can breathe with the way you let me down. Love is more than telling me you want it. I don’t need the words, I want the sound, sound, sound, sound, sound.”

There is something mesmerizing and freeing about being in a ballroom full of people singing about how we all deserve to feel a love that reverberates through the walls of our body instead of being with someone who says words their actions clearly don’t reflect.

I felt Carly was a friend telling me how people she’s loved have failed her and asking me to ask for more for myself. 

While at one point Carly’s lyrics embodied the same kind of embarrassment I felt in romantic pursuits, constantly asking if she’s too much, her newer songs are full of statements about what she wants and deserves, and an unabashed too muchness, no sugar-coating. This transition gave me, too, the ability to say I love myself enough to ask for more, and know that’s not a bad thing.

That summer, I started going on dates seriously for the first time since my breakup with Aiden a year earlier, and I promised myself, thanks to Carly, that I would say what I want, instead of trying to get someone to approve of me. I made out with girls on street corners at odd hours of the night. I had awkward dates where people made me feel small, and instead of pining after those people, I told myself I had nothing to prove. I put myself first. I realized I needed someone totally different than the kind of person Carly sang about in her earlier songs, who made her feel like she had to be ashamed of how much love she has to give.

Shortly after that realization, I dated a girl who asked me to make her a picnic in the park for one of our dates and ended things when I actually put it together because I went “too all out” for a few weeks of dating. She said she wanted something less complex. I didn’t feel crushed by it. I was no longer convinced the “problem” was me. We were two people who wanted different things. I didn’t have to show someone I was worthy, because I knew there would be other people out there.

After she ended things, I biked back to my apartment, finished the rest of the picnic myself, texted one of my best friends that another girl had broken it off, and hit play on “Party for One” on Spotify: “Party for one, if you don’t care about me I’ll just dance for myself, back on my beat, I’ll be the one. If you don’t care about me, making love to myself, back on my beat.”

Carly, of course, was there for me after yet another disappointment, giving me permission to put myself first, reminding me I don’t need anyone who doesn’t need me.

When I started seeing my last girlfriend earlier this year, I was surprised and delighted by how forward she was. She asked me out first. We talked about politics openly. There was nothing taboo, and no need to hold back real, strong feelings we wanted to share. She told me she liked me on our first date, and I lent her my favorite poetry book. I could be open and vulnerable without worrying she might use it against me.

After our second date, I texted her a video of me dancing and singing to “Too Much.” She responded by saying she loved the video, and that she also related to the song. “I often feel like I’m too much. But I don’t feel that way with you, which is wonderful. I feel like we’re both The Right Amount.” My heart swelled. I’d been waiting for years to hear someone say that to me. It was just the affirmation I needed to know I was going in the right direction, that there are people in the world who will take you as you are. Although that relationship didn’t last, Carly’s music has continued to remind me that kind of self-acceptance can be constant.

I press play on “Too Much,” and in the process of listening closely for the first time in a while, I remember that finding someone who doesn’t think I’m too much is not the point at all, but putting myself out there is: “When I party, then I party too much, when I feel it, then I feel it too much, when I’m thinking, then I’m thinking too much . . . so be careful if you’re wanting this touch ‘cause if I love you, then I love you too much.”

In singing along, I don’t find self-pity, and I don’t feel foolish. I sing the words, letting the world and anyone who wants to get close know exactly who I am.