There’s a cruel joke in the English language: how “mindful” and “mind full” are separated by just a space, yet describe completely opposite states of being.

For years, I was the latter while believing I was the former.

My mind wasn’t calm—it was crowded. Picture a browser with fifty tabs open, each demanding attention, each claiming priority. People saw me engaging deeply in conversations, offering thoughtful responses, and called it mindfulness. What they couldn’t see was the mental CPU running at 100%, the background processes consuming all available RAM.

“You’re too much sometimes,” they’d say in one meeting. “You’re so mindful,” they’d say in another. Both were true, and both stemmed from the same overflowing mind. When every thought, feeling, and observation demands to be processed, analyzed, and acted upon, you’re not practicing mindfulness—you’re drowning in consciousness.

It’s like the difference between a security camera that’s always recording and a photographer who knows when to take the shot. I was the security camera, capturing everything, storing everything, replaying everything. No wonder I burned out. No wonder I could be “too much.” My mind wasn’t practicing awareness; it was hoarding experiences.

All this time, I wasn’t being mindful—I was being mind-full.

The thoughts weren’t flowing through; they were piling up.

True mindfulness, I’m learning now, isn’t about capturing every detail or being hyperaware of every moment. It’s about knowing when to let thoughts pass by like clouds in the sky, rather than trying to catch and catalog each one. It’s about creating space between the thoughts, not filling every microsecond with mental activity.

Sometimes, being “too much” isn’t about intensity—it’s about the absence of gaps. The absence of rest. The absence of empty space where new understanding can grow.

So here I am, learning to empty my mind instead of filling it. Learning that awareness doesn’t mean analysis. Learning that some thoughts can pass through without requiring my full attention.

Maybe you too are carrying around a mind full of unprocessed thoughts, wearing it like a badge of mindfulness.

Maybe it’s time we both learned to create some empty space in our internal databases.