Self-Censorship
The journey to speaking with courage
In corporate America there is almost always someone in a role like mine (diversity) encouraging you to bring your whole self to work. Be comfortable, be authentic, be you. But of course the actual message reinforced in our day to day work lives is be only a certain kind of you, only the parts of you that fit in nicely with the rest of us.
I should add that I no longer say this. I am not bringing my whole self to work and most others don’t either. There is always going to be some level of your personality, of your history, that remains at home and outside of most of your workplace interactions. It is unrealistic to expect otherwise. The goal instead should be to close the gap between who you really and who you present at work, to reach the level of comfort or safety that allows you to challenge ideas or bring new ones to the table, regardless of who is sitting at it.
But what happens when you are never quite yourself? What happens when every written word (private or shared), every spoken word, every interaction is never quite the whole self?
My dad reminded me recently that he had always felt my blog wasn’t the best idea - wouldn’t it better to have a private place to really write it all out? But writing it all out is the peak I have yet to summit. There is no piece of paper, no private Word document that I have ever laid down all the hard and messy thoughts to try to find the truth. Before I ever started my first diary in elementary school I knew any thoughts that exited my head, whether said out loud or written down, could be consumed by someone else and judged. That feelings fully articulated into thoughts are real and then what do you do with them? These were risks I wasn’t going to take.
This weekend I booked a rental house less than an hour from home with 10 other women. It was our second visit to “Myrtle’s Mansion” which we named for the home’s former matriarch. Initiated as a creative retreat it is a weekend without obligations. Meals are shared. Activities are a mix of crafting, puzzling, reading, even hiking. Naps are welcomed. As we sat on rocking chairs outside sharing some of our hopes for our upcoming years and the ones to follow, several of us had a common theme - to find a way to be more true to ourselves. To be a little more real. To stop switching personas depending on the venue we find ourselves in.
And so I practice. I practice getting closer in therapy. I practice with a newsletter post that is a little more honest. I try to say more of the things I think, days after I think them rather than weeks or months. (I’m working up to real time - don’t rush me!) At work I practice giving constructive feedback in the conversations where I find it most difficult - when it is expected to be full of corporate jargon and references to strategy and revenue. Conversations where people care about things like hierarchy.
And then I do it again tomorrow.
In the meantime I’m…
Watching: I dived right into the very short season of The Tourist recently, a drama set in Australia where a man wakes up from a car
accident without his memory. It is full of dark humor and complex characters. Season 2 comes to Netflix on February 29th!
Listening: My most recent obsession is Jon Batiste. After watching American Symphony on Netflix and seeing him in The Color Purple I went down a rabbit hole of his music. I’m not a big jazz fan but songs like Freedom are on repeat for me right now.
Parenting: So much of parenting seems to be thinking about you were raised and then deciding if this is something you want to bring into your home. But so much of parenting is also bringing behaviors that come from the way you were raised into your home wherever you’re aware of it or not. I’ve been thinking lately on the conversations that didn’t happen when I was a kid and what I can learn from that as a mom.
