The Year I Stopped Explaining Myself
I used to preface every opinion with a disclaimer. "I might be wrong but..." "This is just my take..." "I don't know if this makes sense..." At some point I realized I was apologizing for existing in the conversation before anyone had even pushed back.
The year I stopped doing that was uncomfortable. People noticed. Some of them didn't like it. A few of them liked it a lot. The ones who didn't like it were mostly people whose opinions I'd been managing with my disclaimers — softening my positions so they wouldn't feel challenged. Turns out they were challenged anyway. The disclaimers just made me smaller without making the challenge smaller.
What the Disclaimers Were Actually Doing
They were a preemptive apology. A way of saying: I know I'm taking up space here, I'm sorry, please don't be mad. The problem is that the apology didn't prevent the pushback — it just signaled that I was available to be pushed. It was an invitation.
The creative community has been talking about this — how women in creative spaces often perform uncertainty even when they're not uncertain. How the performance becomes a habit that's hard to break even when you know you're doing it.
The Transition
I didn't flip a switch. I started small — stopped saying "I might be wrong but" before opinions I was actually confident about. Just stated the opinion. Waited. The world didn't end. People responded to the opinion instead of to my uncertainty about the opinion.
Then I started noticing when I was genuinely uncertain versus when I was performing uncertainty. Those are different things. Genuine uncertainty is useful information. Performed uncertainty is noise.
The writing at josephcalitoy.com has some related material on this — the difference between honest doubt and habitual self-diminishment.
What Changed
Conversations got shorter and more useful. I stopped spending energy on the management of other people's comfort with my opinions. I started getting clearer feedback because people were responding to what I actually thought instead of to a softened version of it.
Some relationships changed. A few ended. That was information too.
More on this at Wicked Youth — there's a whole conversation there about the performance of uncertainty and what it costs. And more at Girl Next Up.