I Don’t Speak Much. But Words Are Everything.

On being dyslexic and in love with reading. On belonging to no language and writing in all of them. On why words, for some of us, are not a means of communication but something far closer to a foundation.

I am dyslexic. I have always loved reading. I know how that sounds — like the setup to an inspiring story about overcoming. It is not that, or not only that. It is more like the first thing you need to know about my relationship with words, because it explains a particular quality of that relationship: it was never easy, never automatic, never something I could take for granted. And perhaps because of that, it became something I have never been able to treat casually.

Those who know me well will have seen it. When I write quickly — in a message, in a note, in the middle of a thought that is moving faster than my hands — the letters tumble. They arrive out of order, transposed, sometimes unrecognizable until you slow down and read generously. My brain knows exactly what it wants to say. The path from thought to letter is just not always direct. It takes detours. It scrambles the sequence while keeping the meaning entirely intact — at least from the inside.

I have made a kind of peace with this. The scramble is part of the territory. And in a strange way, it has always reminded me that words are not natural — not given, not automatic. They are something we construct, imperfectly, under the particular conditions of a particular mind. My conditions simply make that visible in a way that others can see too.

Words, for me, have always required effort. Which means they have always had weight.

How the love began.

My mother used to take me to used bookstores. Not occasionally — regularly, ritually. We would go from one to the next, spending hours in the kind of places where books are stacked without ceremony, where spines are cracked and covers are soft with handling and the smell is something between dust and possibility. We would scour. That is the right word for it — not browse, not shop. Scour. And then we would come home with sacks of books. Actual sacks. The weight of them was satisfying in a way I still remember.

This is how you fall in love with reading when you are dyslexic — not through ease, but through abundance. Not because the words come quickly, but because the worlds inside them are worth the effort it takes to get there. The difficulty never disappeared. But somewhere inside those sacks of secondhand books, it stopped being the point. The point was what was waiting on the other side of it.

This is also, in a very direct sense, how I found yoga. In one of those sacks, on one of those afternoons, I found an old copy of the    Mahabharata. I could not stop reading it. That book did not let me go — and it has not let me go since. Everything that followed,          the practice, the study, the studio, the teaching — it traces back to that afternoon, that bookstore, that particular weight in a bag.

No language was ever fully mine. And yet.

The first language I learned was English. But I did not grow up in an English-speaking world. The world around me spoke Tagalog. The world inside my home spoke something else again — a layered, shifting mixture of languages that I absorbed without ever fully claiming any single one as my own. More languages were spoken in that household than I can count today with any security.

And then I moved. And kept moving. Languages arrived and departed like weather — necessary while they were present, gone when the landscape changed. I learned enough of each to survive in it, to work in it, sometimes to study in it. And then the next place demanded something different, and I adapted, and the previous language receded. Not forgotten exactly. More like set aside. Like clothes you no longer wear but cannot quite bring yourself to give away.

A life in languages

English  ·  Spanish  ·  Tagalog  ·  Visayan  ·  Arabic  ·  Mandarin  ·  Japanese  ·  German

learned first · lived in · spoken at home · acquired on the road · written in for a dissertation · none of them ever fully dominant ·          all of them somehow still present

What this means, in practice, is that I have never had the luxury of a “mother tongue” that first language in the full sense — that language which lives in the body, which you dream in, which arrives before you have to think about it. I have always had to think about it. Every language I have ever used has required a small act of translation, a slight crossing of distance. Even now, even in the language I am most comfortable in on a given day, there is always a half-step between the thought and the word.

And yet the languages do not stay separate. They bleed into each other constantly, and I have stopped trying to contain them. Mid-sentence, I will reach for a word and find that it only exists — precisely, exactly, with the right weight — in a different language than the one I am currently speaking. So that is the word I use. The conversation shifts and the other person adjusts or they do not, and either way the thought has been honored.

But it goes deeper than vocabulary. I have noticed, over the years, that my emotions have their own mother tongues. When I get angry — truly angry, not irritated but the slow-burning kind — I begin to think in German. Something about its precision, its capacity for compound weight, is what anger reaches for. When I curse it is English, immediate and blunt, no ceremony. When something startles me — a sudden noise, an unexpected moment — the words that come out are Tagalog, unbidden, before I have thought anything at all. And when I speak of love, of tenderness, of the soft things, Spanish or Arabic arrives first. Those languages carry endearment in their structure in a way that others, for me, do not.

I find this extraordinary, and I find it humbling in equal measure. It suggests that language is not only a tool I use — it is a geography I inhabit differently depending on what I am feeling. That each language has claimed a particular emotional territory inside me, without asking permission, simply by being the language that was present when that territory was first being mapped.

You might expect this to create a distant relationship with language. It created the opposite. When you cannot take words for granted, you attend to them differently. You notice their weight. Their texture. What they can carry and what they cannot. The gap between what a word means in one language and what its closest equivalent means in another — that gap is where a great deal of my thinking lives.

Writing is where I became fluent.

Speaking is one thing. Writing is entirely another. And this is the part that still surprises people when I tell them: my academic career was built almost entirely on writing. A thesis. A dissertation. A research paper. Each one in a language that was not mine by birth or by long immersion. Each one, before the age of AI, when the writing had to come entirely from inside.

I did not write academically despite the dyslexia and the linguistic displacement. I wrote through them. Writing was — and remains — the place where the scramble resolves. Where the layered, overlapping, not-quite-settled quality of thinking in multiple languages at once finds a form it can hold. On the page, I am not switching between languages or reaching across distances. I am simply in the thought. The writing is how the thought becomes visible to me.

Writing is not how I communicate what I have already understood. It is how I understand it in the first place.

This is not a metaphor. I mean it literally. I can carry something unresolved in my mind for days — a question, a tension, a situation that does not yet make sense — and the moment I begin to write about it, it starts to clarify. Not because writing gives me answers. Because the act of finding words for something forces the thinking into a precision that staying inside my own head never requires. You can be vague in your own mind. You cannot be vague on the page without noticing it immediately.

This is why I write about politics. About society. About the structures I am living inside and the ones I am trying to dismantle. Not because I have figured these things out, but because writing is how I figure them out. It is my primary instrument of understanding. Everything else — the teaching, the conversations, the activism — comes after the writing has done its work.

I don’t speak much. That is not shyness.

People who meet me sometimes read my quietness as reserve, or distance, or possibly arrogance. It is none of those things. It is the same relationship with words applied to speech: I do not say something until I mean it. And meaning something takes time.

I can sit with a thought for days without needing to speak it to anyone. This might sound strange — and I am aware that it is not the most common way of moving through the world. But for me, the internal processing is not incomplete until it is spoken. It is complete in itself. The writing is the output, when output is needed. The speaking is for when I am ready, and I am rarely ready as quickly as the world seems to expect.

I am aware this makes me seem, in conversation, like someone who is holding back. I am not holding back. I am still arriving.              There is a difference.

What this means is that when I do speak — when I finally say a thing — it has been weighed. It has been carried for however long it needed to be carried. It has been turned over, examined, revised internally, and then released. This is also why, when I say something and it is later disputed or dismissed, the experience is not just frustrating. It is disorienting in a way that goes deeper than disagreement. A word that has been weighed is not something I can lightly take back or revise. It came from somewhere real. Questioning it is not just questioning the statement. It is questioning the process that produced it — and, by extension, the foundation on which that process rests.

Words as the way I live in the world.

I want to say something about what words actually do for me, beyond the personal and the familial. Because this is also, for me, a political and philosophical matter.

The world I am living in — the politics of it, the injustices of it, the structures that need dismantling and the ones that need building — I navigate all of this through language. Not through the language of slogans or of simple positions, but through the harder, slower work of finding words that are actually true to the complexity of what is happening. Words that do not flatten. Words that hold the contradiction rather than resolve it prematurely. Words that can be handed to someone who disagrees and still make sense to them, even if they respond differently.

This is why imprecision bothers me in a way that other people sometimes find disproportionate. An imprecise way of speaking is not just inaccurate. It is a missed opportunity to actually see something clearly. And in contexts where clarity matters — in activism, in teaching yoga, in the navigation of power and justice — an imprecise communication can do real damage. Not because words are more powerful than actions, but because words are how we orient toward action. Get the word wrong, and you will orient toward the wrong thing.

Advaita Vedanta has a word for this too: sabda — the power of sound and language as a vehicle of truth. The tradition understood, long before modern linguistics, that how we name something shapes how we see it. That language is not neutral. That the words available to us in a given language, in a given culture, in a given historical moment, are not simply tools we pick up and put down. They are the glasses through which we see, and most of the time, we do not even know we are wearing them.

For someone who has lived across many languages, this is not an abstract concept. I have experienced it bodily — the way a thought that exists clearly in one language becomes blurred in another, or the way a feeling that has no word in English has three distinct words in Tagalog, each pointing to a slightly different shade of the same inner weather. The gaps between languages are not failures of translation. They are windows into different ways of being human. And having spent a life moving between those windows, I am perhaps more aware than most of how much the available words are shaping what I can and cannot see.

This is why I write.

Not to perform clarity. Not to produce content. Not even, primarily, to communicate — though I hope that happens too. I write because it is the closest I have to a native language. Not English. Not Tagalog. Not German. Writing itself — the act of finding the word that is actually true, of staying with a sentence until it holds what it needs to hold, of following a thought past the point where it gets uncomfortable, and seeing where it actually lands.

The dyslexia is still there. The scramble between thought and letter has not disappeared. But somewhere between the difficulty and the discipline, writing became the place where everything resolves. Where the multiple languages stop competing, and the thought itself takes precedence. Where the weight that words have always carried for me — the weight of my grandfather’s dignity, my father’s integrity, my mother’s love of books — finds a form that can be handed to someone else.

I do not speak much. But when I write, I mean every word.

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A note on what this is — and what it is not.

I want to be careful about something before I close. None of what I have written here is meant to suggest that my relationship with words is easier than yours, or better, or more evolved. It is not a claim to a superior sensitivity. It is not a hierarchy.

I am far too deep in the study of the Self — and far too honest about what the doctrine of karma asks of me — to make that mistake without noticing it. Karma places me precisely where my unresolved patterns require me to be. And one of those patterns, clearly, is this: an intense, sometimes difficult, occasionally painful relationship with language and the weight I assign to it. That is not a virtue. It is a formation. Mine, specifically. Shaped by everything that made me.

And like everything produced by the mind, it is also — the Advaita framework will not let me forget this — a perception. A construction of the buddhi. My intellect, organizing experience through the particular lens of someone who has lived this particular life. It may be a useful construction. It is still a construction.

So read this, as I always ask: take what resonates. Question what does not. Your relationship with words is your own, shaped by what shaped you. This is only mine.

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Erika Smith Iluszko is the founder and director of Manas Yoga Vienna and a student of Advaita Vedanta, Yoga, and Traditional Chinese Medicine. This blog is her space for writing that refuses to separate philosophy from the lived, complicated, imperfect experience of being human.