Every Word A Bridge

On Finding and Rediscovering Your Voice

Personal photo. In my home office in Los Angeles.

The first time my words clicked together like Legos, I was 12.

English was my second language. My family and I moved from Sweden when I was eight, when I only had a handful of words like “hello” and “good” in my back pocket. I learned the language quickly, becoming fluent within a year or two. Yet it wasn’t until seventh grade that I began to trust my words. I still remember the day I felt it viscerally shift, as if my once-displaced organs reassembled back into their rightful places.

I was typing away on a barely-working, hand-me-down iMac in a four-by-six-foot converted closet to complete an assignment, the heat from the computer like a sauna in the tight quarters. The temperature barely registered, though, because something big was happening. As I plucked the keys of the bulbous, bright orange machine, the English words I knew began to feel insufficient to my needs. I opened up my weighty thesaurus, unearthing the subtleties among its many offerings. Many words didn’t feel like synonyms; they came at me like whole new worlds. I plucked and prodded, naively curating tone and meaning that felt better aligned with my eager heart.

I’ve been told “Thesaurus writing” is one of the least original forms of communication. I understand the sentiment, but that mindset undermines the value of being word-curious — especially in young writers. Learning the complexity of language is a superpower. To explore the boundlessness of linguistic tapestries is to open up one’s world to deeper levels of empathy, inquiry and humanity.

I recognized that in myself. Just four years removed from my native land and language, I was finding a new home, not in place but in words.

At 16, I began to understand the power words had to tell stories.

As an immigrant, I’d spent so much time learning the language that English had quickly become my subject of choice. The need to learn the language simultaneously produced a creative outlet. If I could imagine a story, either fantastical or true-to-life, I believed I would somehow find a way to express it.

My sophomore English teacher, Mr. Dundon, affirmed this for me. One day, a week after submitting our five-paragraph midterm essays, Dundon surprised the class by reading aloud a paragraph that he framed simply as “excellent writing.” He said it moved him, and we all prepared ourselves for the work of one of the literary giants we were reading that year.

It was the first time I heard my words echo back at me. When he asked for its author, I shyly (and proudly) raised my hand. As my peers turned toward me, I felt raw and exposed, as if standing before the class naked. But that feeling of purpose still resonates, knowing I’d found my stride through the sludge of words and phrases and grammar I’d only begun learning a few years prior. My foreign language had become my safe haven. My world had inverted, as if I’d planted my flag in the middle of the cosmos — the expansiveness around me infinite, daunting, beautiful.

It wasn’t until age 19 that I first realized the capacity of words to heal and restore.

A freshman in college, I remember the first evening I spent writing freely as a release, not to fulfill an assignment. As depression swallowed me whole, words became my antidepressant — each sentence chipping away at the earth hardening around my feet. The ongoing trials at home — divorce, abuse, financial distress — were corrosive, and the pressures of helping to support a struggling family as a teenager had left me depleted, my youth drained. I was quieter now than I used to be, more jaded, less curious. I often hid, tucking myself into isolated campus corners, pouring my energy into the only pursuit that brought me peace.

Personal photo.

I wrote about fear, family, unraveling the dysfunction that plagued me. Worrisome stuff, I’m sure. But after putting pen to paper? It was as if the emotions I’d been feeling for years but struggling to name had crawled to the surface. The floodgates were open. I confronted my demons. Though terrifying, they were less scary than what remained invisible. So I wrote until it all became clear, until I found the words to name it all.

In the years immediately after college, my writing got worse before it got better. My bravado grew, and with it, my aimlessness and lack of focus. I was proud of my ability to generate pages on pages of text. It was good therapy and existentially productive, but not yet a path to career-propelling work. I thought I was good; I wasn’t. Talented, maybe, but too aware of it. I championed bluster over feeling, poeticism over precision. I didn’t understand yet that in writing, nothing is given. All clarity is earned, every word extracted, each edit surgical. It’s a painstaking process that tests one’s fortitude. I had yet to do that work.

But words had their hooks in me. I couldn’t shake the resolve to make something of my disarray. To seek clarity in the chaos.

In my mid-20s, I began to find my voice.

I started graduate school and became a student of the craft. I found inspiration in the words of Baldwin, Morrison, Coelho and Ellison. I learned to see the beauty in subtlety. I embraced heavy editing, let others poke and prod every word and kill off most of my darlings. I welcomed challenges and stretched myself always — finding a balance between reflection and structure, sentiment and truth. I pushed out my best work and trusted that my finest was yet to come.

I’d finally separated reflection from craft. What I “thought,” important though it may be, wasn’t always meant for the page. I came to see that for me, writing has two fundamental stages: the musings necessary to reflect on my life and the excavation of these reflections to produce something compelling and relatable. It took ego death, patience and discipline to advance toward the artist I hoped to become. Not to leave reflection behind but to refine it, to understand it palpably. Like the creation of a sculpture, my writing had evolved to the steady chipping away of a stone slab.

But what happens when one begins to cherish the statue more than the sculpting process? What becomes of craft when one must turn art into profit?

Photo Courtesy of Author.

Now I’m 32. After more than five years of copywriting and entrepreneurship, I’m remembering why I must write.

I’ve spent many years as a brand consultant and storyteller consumed with the words and worlds of others. During that time, I neglected my own. Lately I’ve returned to my craft, albeit less confident than I once was even though the stakes have never been lower. I make more excuses. Something subconscious plots to refuse me the time and focus necessary to write freely.

I got so used to fear and pain during college that I made a home in it. I found safety in heartache because my depression convinced me it was all I deserved. And though my subconscious was trying to write its way out, it thrived in unhappiness. It was easy to write about the things that pained me; it was a way to temper the storm within. Now that I’m on the other side, I’m not sure how to write about my peace. I’ve found it’s much more challenging to write honestly about joy.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video of a pianist who came across a piano in a public square somewhere in Western Europe. She approached the instrument, placed her hand on it and gently found her seat, completely unaware that someone was recording from a distance.

After a few deep breaths, her fingers began twinkling over the keys, replicating a Ludovico Einaudi tune. The volume was initially soft, only audible to those close by. Bit by bit, the music amplified and the pavilion quieted. Passerbys slowed and centered themselves around the grand piano. I felt I was there, too, as present as the growing audience at her back.

There was something so pure about her play — something so innocent in the enjoyment it brought others. Her performance was honest, void of pretense or expectation. She held the energy of the pavilion at her fingertips; it swelled as she swelled and waned as she waned. She was free.

Eyes watering, it struck me how distant I’d grown from my art. When I was younger, I didn’t write to fill the pantry…I wrote to fill the heart. Yet somewhere between being a wordsmith-for-hire and growing an agency of Black creatives, I began to view writing as a means to an end, not an end in itself. In my transition from writing as an expression to a writing career, I lost sight of what it could still mean for my spirit.

How does that kid who wrote for survival redirect his focus now that his heart, much older, is overflowing? I remind myself that although I am no longer battling trauma or depression, I will never be done growing and learning. That there is much I still wish to express and make plain. That I’m disinterested in anything that does not first nurture my soul. That what makes my writing unique is not my ability to stitch together words but my relentless drive to suffuse them with my humanity. To use every word as a bridge between you and me.

I write to create. To subvert. To find beauty in the mess of the mundane. Writing now is not about survival but about self-actualization — the ongoing discovery and reclamation of my humanity.

Words have their hooks in me. And I’ll write until I can find the words to name it all.