At three years old, before any of the more sophisticated apparatuses of self-doubt had been installed, you were a tireless commentator on the universe; you named everything, you asked impossible questions about death and rainbows and why the bath water disappeared when you pulled the plug, you announced your preferences without preamble or apology, and you did not, at the tender age of three, pause for so much as a moment to assess whether the room would welcome your contribution before contributing. You contributed, because contributing was, at that age, simply what being a small person felt like — an outflowing rather than a calculation.

Where did that small person go, do you think? She is still in there — I am quite sure of it — but somewhere between the age of three and the age you presently are, she learnt, by accumulating small evidences, to filter; to wait; to assess, before opening her mouth, whether the assessment of the room was likely to favour her opening it. She learnt to swallow the unfinished sentence, to make her preferences smaller and more reasonable and less embarrassingly her own, to deliver only the polished, smoothed, socially acceptable version of whatever she had originally intended to say. And by the time you are forty, you have absorbed perhaps a thousand small instructions to be less, and they have arranged themselves quietly inside you as a kind of internal weather, and you call that weather your personality, and you do not see — you cannot, by this point, easily see — that it is, in fact, a habit of self-suppression so ancient you have forgotten its origin.

What was the first lesson, in your case? It is rarely a single lesson; it is more often a series — the tired parent who answered one too many questions through gritted teeth, the teacher who said your hand was up too often, the friend in the school playground who rolled her eyes at your enthusiasm, the boyfriend in your twenties who let you know, in a thousand wordless ways, that your stories went on rather longer than was attractive. None of these moments was, on its own, decisive; but together they composed a curriculum, and the curriculum had a single subject, and the subject was the gentle, civilised diminishment of the inner three-year-old.

What might it be like, even for a single afternoon, to write something with no editor in the room? Most of us, by midlife, can no longer do this with any ease; we edit as we speak; we edit as we type. The sentence is composed in the head, judged for acceptability, refined, smoothed, and then delivered — and what reaches the listening world is the polite, socially negotiated version. The polite version is fine, and it will do, and it will not get us into trouble; but it will also not, in any meaningful sense, be us. Are you, perhaps, slightly exhausted by being the polite version of yourself for so many years? Have you noticed how often, in the course of an ordinary day, you say things you do not quite mean — agreeing with opinions you do not hold because the disagreement would have cost more than the small dishonesty, laughing at jokes that were not funny because the social cost of not laughing exceeded the private cost of laughing anyway? We have built entire adult lives out of these small accommodations, and we do not, on the whole, see them as costly; we see them as the price of getting on, of being liked, of being a good colleague and a good friend and a good partner.

There is a difference, though — and I would not labour this if I did not think it mattered — between a useful filter and a permanent gag. What is the test of the difference? It is this, I think: at the end of the day, when the door has closed behind you and the performance of the day has concluded, do you still know what you actually think? Or has the steady all-day adjusting to other people's rooms left you slightly unable to locate your own opinions, even in private, with no audience present?

That is a particular and rarely-named loneliness — the loneliness of not being able to find oneself, even alone — and it is what happens, I have come to believe, when the editing has been going on for so long that the editor and the original speaker have, at some point unmarked by ceremony, become indistinguishable. The voice is not, after all, fundamentally about volume; it is not about being loud or commanding or articulate. It is about whether the thing coming out of your mouth is something you would, if pressed, be willing to sign your name to — whether it is recognisably, irreducibly your own.

How does one find one's way back, when one has lost track of where the voice has gone? It begins, I suspect, with very small risks — smaller than one would believe could matter. It begins with telling one person, in a low-stakes setting, an actual opinion you have been pretending not to have. It begins with declining an invitation you have for years been saying yes to without enjoying. It begins, more privately still, with admitting — to yourself first, perhaps in the privacy of an unrushed evening — that you do not, in fact, like a thing that everyone you know seems to like, and seeing how that admission settles in the body. What is one small opinion you have been hiding? Have you tried, even alone in your kitchen, saying it aloud, just to hear how it sounds in the air? There is something distinctly strange about doing this for the first time after years of silent compliance — the throat, in many adults, has become a rather tight place by midlife, the seat of all the swallowed sentences, the home of the things one decided not to say — and when one begins, at last, to speak one's actual mind, the throat does, sometimes, physically ache. It is not, I should reassure you, broken; it is merely unaccustomed to its proper use, and it will, with patience, loosen.

There is also, I think, the curious phenomenon of writing — many of us discover, in the act of writing, a voice we cannot easily access in speech, because there is something about the slowness of the page, the absence of a watching face, the lack of any pressure to be immediate, that allows the inner speaker to step forward at last. If you cannot yet say the true thing to any other living person, you might try, first, saying it to a notebook — and you may be surprised, even mildly astonished, by what comes out when nobody is going to react.

The journey back to one's own voice is not glamorous; it does not produce a manifesto, and it does not climax in a great moment of self-revelation. It produces, more humbly, a slow accumulation of moments in which you said the thing you meant, in your own words, in your own order, at your own pace; and each such moment adds something back, and each is, however small, a quiet reunion with the three-year-old commentator who once knew, without any question, that her voice belonged in the world. She still does. She always did. The work is only the patient, generous one of letting her speak again — and of staying in the room with whatever she says.