Too Much

As a child in Tennessee, Dolly Parton admired a woman whom the adults around her dismissed. The woman wore bright lipstick, painted nails, and high heels. In Parton’s memory, she was beautiful. Other people used an ugly word for her. Decades later, speaking at the National Press Club in 2009, Parton recalled that this disapproved-of woman had helped inspire her own look. A child had looked at the same person as everyone else and seen something worth becoming.

I keep thinking about the unnamed woman. We know her through someone else’s recollection. We do not know what she wanted from her life, what the remarks cost her, or whether she ever learned that a little girl had admired her. The fame belonged to the child who grew up. The insult had belonged to a person walking down a street.

There is an everyday cruelty in how quickly a human being becomes a warning. Too loud. Too painted. Too feminine. Too masculine. Too eager to be noticed. The words can sound like advice, even care: life would be easier if you softened this part of yourself. Sometimes that advice comes from people who are frightened for someone they love. Sometimes it is simply a demand that nobody disturb a familiar picture of the world.

Imagine being the person who hears it every day. This is a thought experiment, not a reported encounter. Before leaving home, you begin making small calculations: which shirt will attract comments, which gesture should be hidden, whether today you have the strength to be looked at. Getting dressed becomes a negotiation with people who are not even in the room. Their disapproval travels with you before you meet them.

On a much larger stage, the Austrian artist Tom Neuwirth won Eurovision in 2014 as Conchita Wurst, a performer whose glamorous presentation included a beard. Later that year, Ban Ki-moon welcomed Conchita to the United Nations in Vienna, praising the invitation to accept someone who confounded familiar expectations about gender. A performer’s appearance had become part of an international conversation about who deserved respect.

The distance between a hometown pavement and that stage is enormous. The small human question can feel painfully close. Can I be seen without first making myself easier for you to accept? A person watching a performer may be carrying that question in a form the performer will never know. The performance cannot answer for everyone. It can make room for a possibility that had been difficult to picture.

Visibility has limits that applause can conceal. In a large European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights survey conducted in 2023, 54% of LGBTI respondents avoided holding hands publicly with a same-sex partner for fear of attack. In the same report, 55% reported hate-motivated harassment during the preceding year. Published in 2024, these figures concern a comparable group of respondents across twenty-nine European countries. The survey was anonymous and voluntary; it cannot tell us the experience of every queer person.

Holding hands is such a small thing. It can happen without thought between people who feel safe. It is also something a couple can stop doing before anyone else notices. Two hands separate. The conversation continues. To someone passing, nothing has happened. To the people who made the calculation, part of their relationship has just been put away. A world can look tolerant while asking some people to keep performing these tiny disappearances.

That is why I hesitate over stories in which ridicule becomes the necessary first chapter of triumph. Disapproval does not make every person stronger. Some people withdraw. Some decide that being noticed costs too much. The ones who become beloved are visible; the people who quietly stop speaking are harder to find. Nobody should have to turn a wound into a public gift to prove that they deserved kindness all along.

Yet there is something moving about an audience refusing the judgment it has been handed. The feature someone was told to remove can become the detail another person cherishes. A laugh that was embarrassing in one room can make a different room feel hospitable. A face judged excessive can offer someone relief. What moves me is the possibility of recognition passing between strangers, without either person needing to become respectable first.

Admiration brings responsibilities of its own. To love an image of someone is easier than allowing the person a complicated life. An audience can demand endless courage, endless comedy, endless availability. The person who offered a moment of freedom may need privacy, rest, or the freedom to change. Being celebrated should leave space for the ordinary human being underneath the celebration.

I return to Parton’s memory of looking at a woman whom other people had already decided how to see. For a moment, a child’s admiration interrupted that verdict. The woman was still there, in her own clothes, walking her own street. What would it mean to make that interruption ordinary: to let someone pass through the world without first asking her to become smaller?