“Breeze, You’re just a lot to handle,” says any number of what I’m sure are my well-meaning friends.

This sentence. There are so many problems with this sentence. I get this from friends mostly, sometimes an especially blunt acquaintance, I have even gotten from my mom; although to her credit, she has stopped saying it since I have decided against its validity. I get it. I really do. I am an intense person, I’m very passionate, honest, straightforward, I know what I want. There is never any question about my intentions, they are always made very clear. I’m confident, as a rule. For many, that’s very unexpected given my appearance and their preconceived notions. But telling me I’m “just a lot to handle” feels very wrong. I know what you’re thinking, “so what is wrong with it? It seems pretty accurate to me.” Well, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’ll tell you.

My first issue with this statement is the implication that there is something wrong with me. That my being is a behavior problem that needs to be remedied. And while I am certainly aware that I am not everyone’s cup of tea, that does not mean I need to change the kind of person that I am to make others around me more comfortable. My second issue is more about semantics. I don’t like the use of the word “handle.” I am not an object to be dealt with or manipulated. I am not a problem you need to take care of. Animals and celebrities have handlers. I am neither. I don’t need taming. When I think of someone trying to “handle” me, I picture someone trying to fit my whole being into their hands, trying to contain me. I cannot be held in the hands of any one person and I never want to be.

Here’s what I do want: someone to stand beside me. I want people to come up next to me and support me in my decisions, in my journey, in my way of living. To see me as equal and to correct me in my misguided ways. I don’t want people to think of my as some crazy, raging storm they need to avoid and I certainly don’t want the person I end up with thinking they need to control the weather.

This statement is often part of a somewhat bigger conversation in which I am also told that I am intimidating and some people—professors and a particularly anti-feminist college roommate—have told me that I might get farther in life if I don’t try to be “too smart” or let others do things for me sometimes or not wear that particular pair of heels. In truth, I am only intimidating because you were expecting a kind of femininity that is not my reality. While I certainly have no issue with women who choose to subscribe to a more traditional definition of feminism, that is simply not where I stand.in order for me to be pleased with myself, I need a different kind of lifestyle—one that allows me to explore and reach my own full potential. I have been given strength, intelligence and a hunger for greater things and it would be so disappointing for me to give all of that up in order to fall into someone else’s idea of what I should be.

With all of that being said, there is one more thing. I’m not just a lot to handle. My “intimidation factor” is not the only thing about me. As hard as I try, I am not always strength in the face of adversity or confidence in a room of insecurities. I am not always hard and unrelenting and at times I am extremely vulnerable. These parts of me are just as valid and important as the others and perhaps more so because they are very intimate parts of me that I do not and will not show to everyone. It is so hard to hear from people who are supposed to love you that they view you as less than you really are. That they didn’t get to know you as well as you though they had. So don’t tell my I’m “just a lot to handle.” To me, that means you don’t even know me.