why I primarily write in English.

on finding sanctuary in another language

I was invited for an interview at a television studio today. More on that later.

During the interview, I brought up something that made me want to think about it more deeply. I talked about how I mostly write in English, and I touched a little on why I do that.

Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash

I said something along these lines: sometimes it can be triggering or traumatic to write in Nepali, especially as a queer person, because so much of the bullying I experienced happened in that language. The derogatory words that were thrown at me were in Nepali, and writing about those experiences in Nepali still hits too close to home.

Writing about them in English allows me to maintain a certain distance —a linguistic one.

I don’t think I’ve talked about this much before, but I think there is something about having that kind of barrier when writing about traumatic things you’ve gone through.

Sometimes, for your own mental well-being, choosing another language becomes a way of compartmentalizing those experiences.

Having access to a language that is different from your mother tongue gives you a little more room to ponder, question, and reflect without it taking quite as much of a toll on your mental health.

At the same time, I think there were other reasons why I wrote in English.

I went to an English-medium school, where speaking English was heavily encouraged. I think it’s a very common experience in the Nepali context. All your subjects are taught in English except Nepali, and you’re expected to speak English all the time. My school like any other was very strict about it.

Since I was one of the “good” students, I happily spoke English because there was, obviously, this enchantment with English as the “superior language”.

But looking back, I think there was something else going on too.

I wrote about myself in a language that I thought my bullies, and the society around me at the time, could not understand. I thought that, in doing so, they would never have access to me.

It was a defense mechanism. A way of shielding myself from them. Maybe there was even a little bit of defiance in it. I wanted to write in a language that felt inaccessible to the people who had made me feel unsafe. They would not get the privilege of knowing me through my writing.

Now, of course, I write openly about queerness and talk about it on social media. Things are different now. English is much more accessible than it once was.

But at that time, writing in English felt like creating my own sanctuary, my own linguistic space where I could express myself in a language that wasn’t burdened by the memories attached to my mother tongue.

Thinking about this also reminded me of an approach I took during a residential story-writing workshop I co-facilitated last month, organized by Campaign for Change.

The participants were all intersex people, and I encouraged them to write about their own lives in the third person. Instead of writing, “I went through this,” or “I suffered,” I encouraged them to write, “He suffered,” “She suffered,” or even to create a character with another name like Ram or Sita.

Writing your own story can be emotionally overwhelming, especially when it is full of hardships. Sometimes writing as “I” can make it difficult to finish your story because you have to relive every moment as you’re writing it.

Writing in the third person doesn’t make the story any less true, but it can make it a little more bearable. You are still writing your own life, but you also become a character. You get to look at yourself from a different lens, from a different point of view.

Two participants adopted this approach, and they later shared that it was something they had never tried before. They found it liberating. It gave them more room for creativity, imagination, dreams, and desires because they weren’t carrying the full emotional weight of writing exclusively as “I.”

So, to come back to why I primarily write in English, I think it was also about creating that same kind of distance. It allowed me to see myself through a language different from the one that had been used to bully me.

Having said that, I do want to write more in Nepali. I already write in Nepali sometimes, but I’ve never published anything in the language. But it is something that I want to do, now more than ever.

I guess this means I've reached a point where I'm comfortable reclaiming the language whose words were once used against me.

I want to reunite with the language because Nepali is a beautiful language. It really is. I want to write and read more in Nepali.

And I hope I do.