Oct 16, 2026
I’m done struggling with censorship. I finally accepted that the world doesn’t need the intimate, explicit details of how I was violated.
When I first started writing again, I went through a phase where I wanted to write out every detail of what had been done to me my whole life. I’m a sexual assault survivor, so writing about it felt normal. Then I realized it wasn’t normal. It was probably disturbing, and it should be for my eyes only. I went back through everything I’d written and either took it down or censored it heavily.
It was the last thing I wanted to do. I kept thinking, what’s the point of a piece that isn’t the full story? But once I let myself leave that dark space and write stories that weren’t retellings of my trauma, I saw that the explicit details were never the story. Cutting them didn’t take the experience away. It just took away the picture of it.
I had to rewire my brain to accept that I didn’t need the full picture to tell a story, and that the darkness didn’t have to be the point. The new story I’m working on started getting dark, so dark it was pushing the line. I had to stop for the morning. I was furious that if I wrote the scene the way I wanted, the work would get taken down.
Then I kept thinking about the scene and found another way to write it without turning it into porn. It opened up paths I hadn’t seen before. It worked, and I was glad I could express something without it being SA.
I have a lot to work on as a writer. My career just started, and it’s been good to learn my weaknesses before people see my work. I won’t apologize for the earlier work I published, even though I took it down. It’s how I chose to express myself at the time. From now on I’m keeping that private. It shouldn’t be widely shared. It belongs behind closed doors.