When I Noticed I Was Editing Myself Before I Spoke...

There’s a version of self-censorship that isn’t silence.

You haven't said nothing. Something has been said, just not quite the thing you were thinking.

I’ve generally been good at getting a sense of people and very early in my career I would work out what someone wanted to hear. Then somewhere between the initial thought and the words, I'd create a version of that, instead of what I actually thought.

Not lying. Just adapting. Softening the edge towards what would land well.

Not that it always did land, but it worked to a point. After all, I was being agreeable, diplomatic. I was thought of as easy going and people projected what they wanted onto me.

And the strange thing is, in the moment, it never felt like self-betrayal. It felt like a skill.

And that's the conundrum because there's a version of people-pleasing that looks like emotional intelligence. A version of staying quiet that looks like wisdom. A version of telling people what they want to hear that looks like reading the room.

From the outside, and sometimes from the inside too, they're almost impossible to tell apart.

There’s a cost to how you're seen, of course. The agreeable person is rarely the one whose view people seek out. But that’s not the real cost.

The real cost is that you stop showing up. The version of you in those conversations is smaller than the one inside. Your actual judgment, the thing they needed from you, never quite makes it out.

And do that for long enough and something more fundamental happens.

The more I shaped what I said, the less sure I became of what I actually believed. And when I went looking for it I’d come up short.

The way I learned to tell the difference was in the body.

Now I know that when something is true, I feel it land low in my gut, solidly. When I'm giving a shaped version, the words float. Untethered to anything in me.

The mind can talk itself out of noticing the difference. The body knows which is which.

And recognising which is happening is the difference between being in your life and standing just outside it. Between contributing and merely being present.