Sometimes, I Forget That People Can't Hear What I am Thinking

Why amplifying a voice isn't the same as agreeing with it — and what I'm learning about showing my work online.

I have a bit of a habit, on social media, that I didn’t know was a problem until recently.

I guess, it is just a mirror for the culture on these platforms: scroll mindlessly…. and somtimes, share, mindlessly…

When something online light something up within me — a post, an article, a perspective that I find genuinely interesting — I often share it. Sometimes I agree with it…Sometimes I don’t… but I share it because think I feel it is something worth engaging with.

And here is the thing: in my head, when I hit share on a post, there’s a whole conversation already happening. I’m weighing the argument. I am reading the energy behind the argument. I am tracking that person’s history.

I am also thinking about who pushes back on the post, and why. I’m holding the nuances, the caveats, the parts I’d word differently.

Basically, my relationship to what I share is usually complicated. It is never really just a “like” and “share”.

But nobody sees that. They just see that I shared it.

And only recently, with geopolitical events heating up and the polarity atmosphere being rife, particularly on social media, I've been sitting with something that seems obvious in retrospect: the people reading my posts don't think the way I do.

My internal dialogue is unique. It is my own. And that is wonderful. But I have to not forget that my thoughts do not just magically transfer onto others, because I am merely thinking about them.

My audience does not have access to my internal monologue. They can't see the debate I was running in my head before I clicked share. They receive the signal without the context that made the signal make sense.

The gap between thinking and posting

Most of us carry around positions that are layered. There’s what we think, and then there’s what we think about what we think. There are the arguments we’ve already imagined someone making against us, and the parts we’d concede, and the parts we’d hold firm on.

But a share button compresses all of that into a single gesture. And on heated topics especially, that gesture gets read in the most charged way possible by the people most primed to read it that way.

A clean take is easy to react to. A layered one asks more of your reader.

But I’ve realised that asking more of my readers is the whole point. If I wanted simple signals, I wouldn’t be writing. The people who read carefully — the ones I actually want to be in conversation with — they can hold complexity. I just have to offer it to them, if I want it in return.

My perspective has never been simple. I just kept forgetting to say that out loud.

A post I recently shared, and what happened

I shared Lissa Rankin’s account of what happened in a Zoom call with Gabor Maté (you can read it, here) — the one where she attempted to name misogyny and patriarchy in a conversation explicitly arranged to discuss Deepak Chopra’s connection to Epstein, and where Maté shut it down and redirected. The piece she wrote is loaded Lissa is a charged messenger, coming in with her own victimisation programs — which I knew, when I shared it.

What I didn’t fully account for was how many different conversations would ignite in the comments at once — and how little of my actual thinking would be visible to the people having them.

From the comments — a snapshot

T

“The author comes off to me as an insufferable fragile toxic woke bigot misandrist feminist victim bully... Gabor Maté is one of the kindest most soft-spoken compassionate empathetic male thought leaders, so even if he did brush her off and invalidate her agenda the reframing of that as her being a bullied victim of patriarchy and white male power is absolutely gross.”

D

“It’s exhausting isn’t it — trying to tease apart the projections from the necessary critiques. Is it easy to believe someone like Gabor could have massive blind spots and be dismissive? Yes. But this woman seems like she’s bringing valuable critique while also leaning towards the “professional victim turned rescuer” archetype. Gee, there’s a pattern isn’t there, when ALL of these spiritual leaders have bullied or “gaslighted” her.”

S

“She created the event and invited a very specific accountability conversation and he didn’t want to have that and redirected it to something else. That’s pretty shitty. Do you not look around at US politics and see the constant manipulation tactics the patriarchy is revealing right now? This is a time of reckoning.”

C

“My body is responding really strong to this. Not in like a “triggered” way, but like a “yellow flag” feels present here.”

Me, in the thread

“I don’t think Gabor Maté is an abuser. At all. He’s just been silent in the face of abuse. But I do think awareness should be raised over the fact that he’s been silent on this matter — and refused to speak about it on the podcast that was arranged to speak about this very matter. That is an orange flag to me.”

Reading back through that thread, I can see what happened. People received the share and filled in my position themselves — based on their own relationship to Lissa, to Gabor, to the broader gender and power dynamics in wellness culture. Some read me as fully endorsing her account. Some read me as uncritically amplifying a “toxic” voice.

None of them were wrong about what they felt. But several of them were responding to a version of me that wasn’t quite real.

Amplification reads as endorsement — whether you intend it that way or not.

What I was actually thinking

When I read Lissa’s piece, I could feel the places where she wasn’t fully owning her part in the culture she’s critiquing. The years of proximity to the very teachers she’s now calling out. The way her own positioning is quietly being rebuilt in the act of taking them down. Dane’s observation — that there’s a pattern worth examining when every powerful figure in your world has “bullied or gaslit” you — landed for me. That’s not a reason to dismiss the critique - but it is another layer worth sharing.

And I shared it anyway.

Because naming what happens behind closed doors in the spiritual industry matters more right now than waiting for a perfectly clean critique. Because Maté’s silence on a podcast arranged specifically to discuss it is, to me, an orange flag — not proof of abuse, but not nothing either. Because the message can be necessary and messy. The messenger can be brave and still tangled in the very thing they’re calling out.

Both things can be true at once. That was my position. But nobody could see it, because I hadn’t written it down before I hit share.

The Mess Can Be The Point

It would be easy to write this piece as pure observation — as a meditation on discourse and complexity and the problem with social media. But that’s not the whole truth.

The other side of this is harder to own: I’ve also stayed quiet when I should have spoken. Many times. Because speaking felt too costly, too messy, too likely to implicate me in the same issues as the thing I wanted to name.

Lissa’s way of going public, going hard, naming names before she’s fully metabolised her own part — that’s not my way. My instinct is to do the inner work first. To sit with something until I feel more neutral. To find the thread of my own accountability before I pull anyone else’s. To make sure I’m not reacting.

That, to me, is maturity. BUT I can acknowledge where my way also has a shadow and I’m only recently starting to see this clearly.

Where I learned it

I grew up having to internalise a lot before I could speak. In my family, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time could start a fire, and so I learned to rationalise quietly, to wait until I was sure before I opened my mouth. I became very good at finding my “part” in things. At not being reactive. At being measured.

What I didn’t see for a long time is that this was also a survival strategy. And survival strategies, even useful ones, have a cost. Mine was that I’d sometimes process myself out of speaking at all. I’d find so much nuance, so much of my own complexity in a situation, that by the time I was “ready,” the moment had passed — or I’d quietly talked myself into believing it wasn’t my place.

Waiting for clean doesn’t protect anyone. It just protects the silence.

So, by me sharing Lissa’s response, it was me saying “this point of view matters”, even if it is messy, even if she has not fully owned her part… she has something important to contribute and listen to.

The mess isn’t a reason to stay quiet — it’s often a sign that something real is happening. That the stakes are high enough to make things complicated. That people are still mid-process because what they’re naming is ongoing.

Why I will only be posting polarising content with sufficient breakdowns, in the future

I don’t think this is just about optics — about managing how I’m perceived. It’s about honesty. If I share something without context, I’m letting a version of me exist online that isn’t quite true. A flatter, more “certain” version that doesn’t account for the beauty, complexity and colours of my inner world and how I really see reality. If I am simply on-sharing other’s perspectives without sharing what is really happening inside of me, then I cannot turn around and be surprised when people make assumptions of my version of reality.

Showing your work isn’t a performance of humility. It’s just accuracy. It’s saying: this is actually how I think, not just what I landed on.

So I am committed to practising something different; to writing the breakdown before I share the post or the article. Showing the debate that’s already happening in my head — because if my position is genuinely complex, then the complex version is the honest one that I should be sharing.

My perspective has never been simple, but out of the convenience of a simple click of the “share” button, I have often left it out or forgotten to say it out loud.

If this resonated, I'd love to hear how you navigate sharing things you don't fully agree with — or whether you've found ways to write through complexity in public. Reply or leave a note.