The pages of a woman’s diary are always sore; filled with songs of anguish and exhaustion. You’d expect heartfelt poetry in those pages, but all you find are the edited words from her spoken verses, in layers and layers of passive anger. Her mind is stripped bare with ink on pages, tucked away calmly in a dusty frail bookshelf. “It doesn’t matter”, is all she would tell you when asked. “These are the things that I feel. But it doesn’t really matter.” She tells herself and all the other curious voices.
I cannot remember the first time my mind was filled with words of self-doubt. However, quite recently, this feeling seemed to have surfaced again. It was a get together with a few friends and acquaintances, where I was asked to read out something. Earlier that evening I had mentioned a piece I was writing on ‘Domestic Love’. On being asked, ‘Hey why don’t you share some thoughts about what we were talking a while back?’, I replied with a shy nod like the reluctant kid was asked to sing in front of relatives. No, this wasn’t the case for sure. I liked the piece I had written. I knew the people. Then what stopped me? A few evening later I realized, I was chronically suffering from self-doubt. But funnily enough, the “I’m not-good-enough” voice in my head wasn’t just mine…it’s a shared disorder!
It’s been more than a hundred years since women have freed themselves from the household boundaries. But maybe we haven’t crossed the mental fencing yet. Yes, the mental boundary. More like a social learning process, a woman learns to tailor herself in numerous ways of being and ways of speaking. The latter is something we acquire and re-learn, time and again without any imposition whatsoever. I am talking about all the times you stopped yourself from speaking your opinion and let your father, brother, male colleague or even best friend speak. I am talking about all the times you’ve questioned yourself, more than you should have questioned others.
Can you count the number of times a voice inside stopped you from speaking exactly what you wanted to speak? The number of times that tiny voice of self-doubt spoke louder than you are verbose? Do you think your life would have been much different if you had only allowed yourself to speak?
Feelings of doubt, shame and guilt occur in women twice the amount of time than in men; consequently, we become more self-critical towards ourselves. As we keep climbing different ladders of our lives and start socializing with more successful people, our self-doubt and anxiety heighten. We often come across our male counterparts, with the same qualification as us, having higher levels of confidence. We need more validation than men do. Just like other aspects of our lives, we inherently feel that what we speak or think is not good enough. And thus starts the process of, what I call, self-editing.
Ironically enough, ‘editing’ as a process, is something very valuable. Putting forward to the world only what is necessary and removing what is not. However, that critical inner voice, saying “Be appropriate”, “Are you sure?” takes this process of editing to an extreme. Just like our social media photographs, our thoughts are edited, filtered and deleted more than it is required and as a result, most of us lose out on innumerable creative ideas and valuable emotions. Our self-doubt shelves away so many ideas that we could’ve spoken and maybe those ideas could have led one of us to be creative directors of leading industry. But sigh! We are unable, most of the time.
Women set high moral boundaries and an idealistic self, according to community and media standards. This heightens our anxieties, lowers our confidence, and funnily enough number of women are diary/journal writers than men. Women need those soft-bound journals as a rescue, as a way of venting. Although women are considered more expressive as a gender, more often those ideas are what we speak after editing thousands and thousands are never trust creative selves.
Apart from this process causing a lag in our careers, women are statistically more prone to facing depression, anxieties, social phobias, and innumerable such mental disorders. Disturbing dreams, stress and such issues could all be solved more easily if at the root we stop taking this process of self-editing to the extremes.
There’s the world of every woman, yet to be expressed…
