What I Really Want to Say
While I share my thoughts quite openly with folks online, I’m still strategic in how I do it. I am constantly worried about offending someone, being taken out of context, or being accused of malicious intentions. So, instead, I carefully fold my words, rolling them around my tongue until they have just enough sugar to not offend anyone, but in doing so I think I’ve been offending myself.
I believed that my constant censoring of self was just as a way for me to achieve the outcome I wanted ~ sure, if the outcome I wanted was to say the thing, but not really say the thing…if you know what I’m saying. I convinced myself that the constant tucking back of words or shifting of sentence structure was in an effort to be clever & concise. I think I was just being careful. I took the edge of all of the things I truly wanted to say, fearful that I would become unlikeable. Less tolerable. People would leave. People would say “You’ve changed.” People would be mad at me. And let’s be clear, the skill of saying the thing without really saying the thing is valuable in our current world. Say enough to be understood by most, but just little enough that people can’t cancel you. And when you aren’t sure what to say, you just say nothing at all.
I implied a lot and I moved my sentence structures around in a way that felt productive and nice. I didn’t want to be seen as the angry fat woman because that would be too close to the trope that we’ve been assigned. I didn’t want to be seen as someone who is dramatic because that’s a stereotype constantly given to women (despite history & our present). So, I played it safe with my words. While the stories and messages I’ve been sharing have been vulnerable, true, and honest, the way I shared them didn’t honour the way I truly felt about them. Since 2020, I’ve been sharing the stories that were hard to talk about, but it felt good because people responded to being seen. I loved that I was helping others feel less alone and in doing so, I felt less alone. Yet, while 2200 characters isn’t a heck of a lot to say what you feel, I constrained myself even more.
I’ve never been comfortable with being misunderstood. I’ve never been comfortable with folks being mad at me. I’ve never been comfortable with disappointing people. I’ve never been eager to flip a table.
But I will if I have to. In real life.
I think social media is such a paradox - share yourself with the world to connect with people around you, but they might not like all of you so share the parts that you think they will like and if you get likes & hearts & comments & shares then you will know what role you play in people’s lives and if you don’t get likes and shares and hearts and comments then that’s NOT the part of you they want to see or respond to. So, over time we slowly start curating OURSELVES to fit the audience instead of the audience to fit OURSELVES. And it’s hard not to let that happen, especially when you’re someone who’s never felt like they belonged (most people). We turn belonging into a quantifiable metric via our analytics panel in our social medias and as such we equate that to our worth and value, only putting out what people want instead of putting out what we want and letting people come or go as they please.
When I was a child, I think around 4 years old the neighbor kids were picking on my brother and apparently I got SO upset that I went after them with a stick until they left him alone. My mom said I cried and had nightmares for weeks. I had become fearful of who I might become if I was allowed to feel all of my emotions - especially the non-pretty ones. And to be honest, I’m still fearful of who I might become if I was to let my emotions release unchecked. It’s that Libra balance thing coming into play, methinks.
So, what do I really want to say? Well, of course this is going to change from time to time, but there’s no time like the present to start:
