The Necessity of Self-Censorship

I gave my daughter prompts: a face, a duct-taped mouth, messy hair, and hairy ears. The duct tape looked like a rectangular mouth, so I added the red. I can’t explain why I put the red dashes on the ear hair. It seemed like the right thing to do.

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I’ve been lying to you, deceiving you for personal gain. Now I’m boxed into a false persona, the walls sodden and soft, collapsing in on me. I loathe the roles I play to survive in society and wish to disown all I’ve become here and elsewhere. Even the voices inside my pillow are full of pretense and rancor. The more I think, the less I know how to exist. Everything in my head is fiction. I flail on the page, not because I lack ideas but because I don’t know who to be. Adding the word authentic to a subject won’t prove anything, nor will it help me understand the person writing this essay.

My callous personalities want to be heard. They use my anxiety as a weapon to fight censorship and won’t quit pestering me. Other selves attempt to fabricate a likable person who can move through digital spaces without conflict or stress, and yet . . . Contradictions are inevitable. Every line is measured, every word a variation, four degrees from its original. I’m not lost. I don’t need a hand. I’m not looking to escape the unreality I’ve constructed as a crutch to keep myself from seeing the failures I inhabit. Expression is my scapegoat, a method to forget the memory palace I built as a mausoleum for my past, a labyrinthine castle with glass walls, gravel floors, and a moat carrying water from Lethe. Monsters in the belfry call me, shouting in the first-person plural. They incessantly argue over whose turn it is. Now you see me, now you don’t.

What the hell are you talking about, Corey?

I recently realized I’ve been censoring myself since I started publishing on Substack, cutting anything that could be viewed as objectionable. No, it wasn’t a realization but an admission. I knew all along yet paid no attention, ignoring my heavy edits and forgetting them until next time. 

Last week, I didn’t have time to write a thoughtful piece exploring ideas or past disasters. So I took the easy route. Opinions are free, easy to steal, and simple to deploy. I knew better. 

“Not Everybody Who Writes is a Writer” began as a different piece, an exercise loosely related to the supposed novel I’m trying to write. Somewhere, I tumbled south and let my snarky thoughts drive me into didactic bitching.¹ I read what I had written and said, “No way. I can’t publish this. Everybody will hate me.” Reflection ensued. I challenged myself to publish it and vacillated for three days, seeking justifications both to share and to destroy it. 

A challenge is a challenge, though, and I’m stubborn. The nuances of self-censorship became conquerable only by publishing the piece, a fatuous and misguided act to indulge my ego.

I’m not special. Many people publishing newsletters and blogs worry about what they should and shouldn’t say, teetering on an illegible line where ego and persona clash. 

Deceit makes our society run smoother. Trivial phrases replace candor and suppress thoughts. If people only said what they meant and didn’t filter their words, mayhem would ensue. We can’t have a civil society without self-censorship. Whether we live in a civil society is debatable. Not everybody plays the game at the same level. Some people speak more freely than others.

We sometimes adjust our conduct to suit a person’s immediate needs, either to help comfort the person or to be nice. People grieve, lose keys, get fired, fall ill, suffer, steal love from lust, become undone, turn hearts to ashes, chase their dust, and crave touch. We listen, advise, or sit silently, then move on, switch roles, travel elsewhere, change again, pay it forward, bend backward, shift personas, ask for favors, and hope others reciprocate.

We all have multiple personalities, so to speak. I’m not the same person in front of my mother as I am in front of my daughter. Few people see the person I am when my daughter and I roam without adult supervision. I change for different people to make each conversation as frictionless as possible without sacrificing too much of who I want to be. I conform to circumstances to accommodate people and behave as I imagine each person wants me to behave based on how I envision the other’s perception of me. The more people in the room, the more difficult it is to choose a persona. Inaction becomes a fail-safe.

It’s impossible to know who we are when we constantly alter our personality and behavior to get from one place to the next without regret. There’s no escaping our incessant self-censorship. It’s a survival skill. Perhaps it’s one reason we’re perpetually searching for meaning, why we use adjectives as ingredients to create identities like brands, and why our culture insists on the concept of a fixed self—to make us feel more grounded among our mutations, for a sense of control. 

So many ways exist in which we metamorphose to appease others, to evade humiliation and dodge confrontation, or to gain status. Nine times out of ten, we have no idea we’re acclimatizing. We do it subconsciously, just as I often subconsciously remove words and phrases to keep you from hating me. 

I want to evoke emotions through my writing, not through controversy. Yet the tedium of constantly eliminating words and opinions that could be controversial or provoke conflict might put me in a straitjacket. All I want to do is write fearlessly. To disguise myself seems dishonest and contrary to the purpose of writing. But to some degree, it seems necessary and unavoidable. Most of you would leave if I continued to publish rants like last week’s. Many subscribers did leave. Whatever. Nothing is permanent. Once I bore or offend you, you’ll unsubscribe, too. The best I can do is find a balance between who I want to be and who I need to be. I make no promises. Every once in a while, some bitching might squeak out. Forgive me or don’t. I’ll leave the way I came in.

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When does being careful with your words become self-censorship? Can silence be a form of self-censorship? Can a lie, if it replaces the thought you wished to say, be a form of censorship?

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1.  One commenter said he enjoyed the beginning of the post but that the rest seemed like “didactic bitching.” He wasn’t wrong. I get carried away. I sometimes think what I have to say is more important than it is. Declarative sentences often overpower me. “Oh, that sounds good. I like that.” Hmm. “But what does it say?” Err . . . “Never mind that. I sound authoritative, almost like I know what I’m talking about.” Riiiight . . .