You Keep Rewriting the Best Part Out
The version you deleted was the one that would have mattered.
I was sitting at my desk at 11:47 p.m. on a Sunday evening.
The post was done. It had been done for two hours. But my hands kept going back to the keyboard.
I softened a sentence that had teeth. Took out the line that made my stomach flip.
Added a disclaimer nobody asked for. Then another one.
By midnight, I had a post that said nothing anyone would argue with.
And nothing anyone would remember. I published it anyway. Got a few likes.
No comments. No shares. And the voice in my head said, See? Nobody cares.
But here is what I didn’t let myself see that night:
nobody responded because the version they got was not the version I wrote.
The version with the edge, the one that made my chest tight, the one I deleted at 11:52? That was the one that would have landed.
The thing is, the filter did exactly what it was designed to do. It made the work invisible.
This is the pattern I see in women who write, teach, and speak.
Not the ones who struggle to start.
The ones who finish something sharp, something true, something theirs... and then edit it into something safe before anyone sees it.
She writes the real thing first. She always does. The instinct is there. The clarity is there. The voice is right.
And then something kicks in.
What will they think?
So she softens the take. Adds a qualifier. Removes the part that made her nervous. Rewrites the opening to sound more “professional.”
Swaps the specific for the general. Cuts the sentence that felt too direct.
By the time she is done protecting herself, the post reads like it was written by a committee. And when it gets no response, she takes that as evidence that she does not have anything worth saying.
She does. She had it. She deleted it.
I want to name what is actually happening here, because it is not about editing skills.
It is not about perfectionism, either, even though it wears that costume well.
What is happening is a negotiation.
Between the version of you that knows what she wants to say and the version of you that learned, a long time ago, that saying it has consequences.
That second version is not stupid. She is not weak. She was trained.
By classrooms that rewarded compliance.
By workplaces that called shrinking “professionalism.”
By relationships that treated directness as aggression.
She learned to scan the room before she speaks.
To pre-reject herself so no one else has to.
To make her message small enough that it cannot be criticized.
And now she is running the same program on her writing.
The edit that makes your work better and the edit that makes your work safer are not the same thing.
They feel the same.
They use the same muscles.
But they produce opposite results.
Better serves the reader. Safer protects the writer.
Here is how you tell the difference
ask yourself, Am I making this clearer, or am I making this less risky?
If you cannot name a specific improvement, if all you can say is “it just needed more work,” you are not editing.
You are managing anxiety with a keyboard. The work was done. Your body just was not ready to let anyone see it.
I think about that Sunday night post sometimes. Not the one I published.
The one I almost published.
I remember exactly which line I cut. It was one sentence. It named something I had not seen anyone else name. It was the reason I sat down to write in the first place.
I cut it because it felt like too much. Like I was being “extra.”
Like someone might read it and think I was being dramatic.
That was the line someone needed and I traded it for a version that made me comfortable and made everyone else scroll past.
The gap between what you know you are capable of and what the world has actually seen from you? It does not live in your strategy. It does not live in your skill set.
It lives in that space between the first draft and the final version.
In the lines you remove. In the edges you sand down.
In the qualifier you add so no one can accuse you of being too sure of yourself.
You are not struggling with your message. You know what you want to say.
You are struggling with what it costs to say it.
And every time you soften the take before anyone asks you to, you teach yourself that your voice needs a permission slip.
It does not.
The next time you finish something and your finger hovers over the delete key, try this:
read the version you are about to erase. Out loud.
Let your body register what it feels like to hear your own unfiltered thought.
If your chest tightens and your brain says that is too much, notice that.
Do not obey it. Just notice it.
That tightness is not a signal that the work is wrong. It is a signal that the work is close.
And “close” is what makes people stop scrolling.
If this hit something you have been dealing with, Get Untrapped is where we go deeper. I write about the patterns that keep women from releasing their work, and I build the tools to interrupt them. Subscribe and I will meet you here every week.
Say it louder for those in the back! 😉