The Voice I Silenced

I used to rehearse before every meeting.

Not just the content — the delivery. The tone. How to say what I needed to say without sounding too aggressive, too emotional, too much. I'd walk into a room having already edited myself three times over, and then I'd sit there, heart hammering, waiting for the right moment to speak.

Sometimes the moment came and I took it. More often, I waited too long, someone else said a version of what I was thinking, and I smiled and nodded like I hadn't been sitting on that idea for the past twenty minutes.

I was silencing myself. And I'd been doing it so long I didn't even notice anymore.

How Self-Silencing Becomes Invisible

The thing about self-silencing is that it doesn't feel like a choice. It feels like caution. Like professionalism. Like reading the room.

You tell yourself you're being strategic. You're picking your battles. You're not going to speak up about something unless you're absolutely certain, because you can't afford to be wrong, can't afford to be dismissed, can't afford to give anyone a reason to doubt you.

But here's what's actually happening: you're doing their work for them. Every time you edit yourself before you even open your mouth, you're pre-emptively agreeing that your voice doesn't deserve to be heard.

And the more you do it, the more natural it feels. Until one day you're in a room full of people and you genuinely can't remember the last time you said exactly what you thought.

The Moment I Heard Myself

I was on a panel — one of those events where they put a few women on a stage and ask them about their careers — and someone in the audience asked me what advice I'd give to younger women starting out.

I opened my mouth to give the answer I always gave. The safe answer. The one about working hard and finding mentors and being patient.

And then something stopped me.

I thought about the twenty-five-year-old version of me, sitting in the audience, hoping for something real. Something that would actually help. And I thought: she doesn't need the safe answer. She needs the true one.

So I said it. I talked about self-silencing. About the years I'd spent editing myself. About the cost of it — not just to my career, but to my sense of self. About how the most important thing I'd ever done was learn to trust my own voice.

The room went very quiet. And then a woman in the third row started crying.

Afterwards she came up to me and said, "I've never heard anyone say that out loud before."

What Reclaiming Your Voice Actually Takes

It's not a switch you flip. I want to be honest about that.

Reclaiming your voice after years of self-silencing is slow, uncomfortable work. It means saying things before you're certain they're perfect. It means watching people's faces and not immediately backpedalling when someone looks uncertain. It means sitting with the discomfort of having taken up space and not apologising for it.

It means noticing the internal editor — that voice that says too much, too strong, too direct — and choosing to speak anyway.

For me, it started small. One meeting where I said the thing I would normally have held back. One email where I didn't soften the ask into oblivion. One conversation where I disagreed out loud instead of nodding along.

Each time, the world didn't end. Nobody walked out. Nobody told me I was too much.

And slowly, the editor got quieter.

Your Voice Is Not the Problem

If you've been told — directly or indirectly — that your voice is too much, too emotional, too direct, too loud, too soft, too anything: I want you to consider the possibility that the problem was never your voice.

The problem was a culture that wasn't built to hear you. A room that wasn't designed for your kind of truth. A system that benefits from your silence.

Your voice — the real one, the unedited one — is not a liability. It's the thing that makes you irreplaceable. It's the thing that, when you finally let it out, makes women in third rows cry because they've never heard anyone say it out loud before.

You've been editing it for long enough.

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The full story of how I found my voice — and what it cost me to silence it for so long — is in Confessions of an Imposter. Available now on Amazon — and the audiobook is live this week too. Listen to the audiobook on Audible — narrated by the brilliant Sarah Kowalchuck.