Why I write in a tongue that’s not my own?
When I feel like writing, English shows up as the right way to express myself on paper. The grammar is faulty. My vocabulary is smaller. Why don’t I feel like writing in Latvian?
It makes me pause. Why? Is it because my ego still craves to be understood and seen by more people? Or is it something subtler, something deeper? Something about freedom—my core value?
There’s something strange and tender about writing in English when Latvian was the first language my lips ever learned.
Latvian holds the lullabies, kitchen smells, forests of childhood, and all the early blueprints of how I learned to name the world. It holds the unspoken rules of how to behave, how to sound, and how to belong.
A Different Kind of Freedom
When we move to a new land—or speak in a language not soaked in our earliest memories—we unhook ourselves from certain invisible patterns. Language carries culture. Culture carries expectations. Expectations can become cages.
Latvian, for me, is sacred. But it also feels weighty. It carries echoes of national struggle, generational silence, and old emotional codes that live in the bones of a place and identity.
Meanwhile, English is not my mother’s language, but the language of my becoming. It doesn’t know the full history of my body. It lets me say things I might not dare to say in my native tongue. There’s more space. More permission. Fewer ancestral eyes are watching.
As writer Jhumpa Lahiri once said after adopting Italian as her language of expression:
“When I write in Italian, I feel I’m someone else. I feel free.”
Distance as Clarity
So many artists have created their most powerful work while in exile, or while writing in a language not their own.
Think of Nabokov, writing his crystalline novels in English long after leaving Russia. Or Beckett, who wrote in French to “write without style,” stripping himself down to essence.Or even Frida Kahlo and Marc Chagall, who created their most iconic paintings while away from their homelands, longing and remembering from afar.
Why? Because distance sharpens the lens.Because when you step away from the painting, you finally see the whole image.Because when you unhook from the language of survival, you touch the language of the soul.
What Science (and Soul) Says
There’s a concept in psychology called the foreign language effect—when we think or speak in a second language, it creates emotional distance. Not numbness, but clarity. The emotions are there, but they don’t hijack us.
Eva Hoffman, who moved from Poland to Canada as a teen, wrote about how English became her intellectual and emotional home:
“Words in English don’t have the same resonance for me. I feel their meanings, but not their textures.”
Neuroscience tells us that early languages are stored alongside emotional memory in the limbic brain. So, when I speak Latvian, I may activate not just words, but subtle emotional codes inherited from culture, family and land.
Writing in English frees me from that. It doesn’t erase who I am—it simply allows another version of me to step forward.
It’s like performing on stage in a costume—you can say more, risk more, explore more. You are still you, but you are also allowed to transform.
And the same goes for expressing yourself beyond language—with drawing, moulding, music, creating, moving your body...
Sometimes the soul chooses another land, language or way of expression not to escape, but to learn and regrow.
What I’m Learning
I’m learning to write in the language that lets the truth come. Even if the words are fewer. Even if the grammar isn’t perfect.
I’m learning to trust my sensitivity, not to judge it. To allow my body to guide the words, not just my head. To be okay with existing between languages, between lands, between definitions.
And maybe this strange in-between place is where my real voice lives.
Between-place is maybe-place. That place of transition, where everything seems possible, but uncomfortably uncertain. And that is where magic happens, isn’t it?