Why Do I Keep Deleting Everything I Create?

I’ve got a confession. I keep erasing myself.

I’ve filmed rage videos—my face red, my chest tight, my voice unshaken—and then deleted them before anyone could see. I’ve taken down photos of jewelry I made with my own hands, because some idiot voice in my head said, “Stay on brand.” I’ve deleted videos of me dancing in my living room because I thought if I wanted to be taken seriously as a mystic, I couldn’t also move like a woman with hips and sweat and rhythm.

It wasn’t because those things were wrong. It’s because they were too right. Too raw. Too me.

When I imagine being fully seen, my body doesn’t brace for judgment—it braces for labor. I can already feel the DMs stacking up: “You changed my life.” “Can I tell you my trauma?” I can hear the invisible strings attached. It’s not visibility I’m scared of—it’s becoming their landfill. The second you let yourself be seen, they crown you their priestess. Their mirror. Their safe mother.

And you know how fast it turns. One minute your voice is “medicine.” The next, when you talk about your own pain, it’s “too much.”

The truth is, when women like us bleed, the room freezes. People don’t know how to look at us human. They only know how to consume the shine. You can feel it, can’t you? That silent pressure to glow forever. To sparkle, but never crack. When they say “don’t stop posting,” what they really mean is “don’t stop entertaining us.”

I didn’t figure this out in theory. I figured it out when a friend told me to “make my posts softer” so the algorithm wouldn’t flag me. When another, during End SARS, told me to lower my voice because she was scared the government might notice me. They called it “strategy.” I called it spiritual gagging. Even my mentor once said she loved my intensity, then told me to water it down so I’d be “more marketable.”

You see the pattern? It’s never outright violence. It’s polite warnings, compliments with teeth, little nudges that rot you from the inside: you’re powerful, but not like that. We love your truth, just don’t say it that way.

What they were really saying was simple: If you want to be loved, betray yourself first.

That’s why women like us go quiet. Not because we lack words, but because the second our voice starts shaking the walls, we panic and hit delete. That reflex isn’t just yours—it’s inheritance. It’s in our blood. Passed down from burned mystics, from colonized women, from mothers who knew what happened when you spoke too loud.

So when I whisper to myself, “This doesn’t feel like me,” I’m not confused. I’m watching myself shrink into a size small enough to survive the room.

I’ve built entire brands from that survival name. Not aliases, but masks:
The soft one.
The mystic with the palatable tone.
The woman who says just enough to be praised, never enough to be punished.

I’ve launched music, written worlds, crafted offers—all wrapped in performance. And every single time, it looked beautiful and felt dead. My body always knew.

You know what it feels like to release something too late? It’s like putting a body in the ground after the soul has already gone. That’s what it felt like when I finally shared my album. I sat on it so long, overthinking, polishing, delaying, that by the time it came out, my voice had already moved on. What I released wasn’t alive anymore. It was an obituary dressed as art.

That’s what fear looks like when it wears discipline.

And I know you’ve done it too. Deleted the posts that were too raw. Softened the words that might have scared them. Buried the work that felt too alive.

The sick part is—we already know what it costs.

So tell me… when are you going to stop betraying the woman in you who hasn’t deleted herself yet?

If this post is your mirror, the Obsidian Naming Rite is where we name the woman who’s still intact beneath all that silence.