A few days ago, I met someone online. We’ve been talking quite a lot, and one of the things I’ve appreciated from the beginning is how comfortable I feel being myself around him. During one of our conversations, he told me he liked the way I write. It was a simple compliment, but it made me explain something about myself that I don’t think I’ve ever put into words before. And while I was telling him, I realised it might be worth telling you too.

I’ve always found it much easier to write than to speak.

People often assume that if someone writes well, speaking must come naturally too. For me, it’s almost the opposite. When I’m talking about something that matters, my thoughts move much faster than my words. By the time I’ve found the right sentence, my mind has already made ten other connections. Sometimes I lose the thread completely. Sometimes I finish a conversation feeling frustrated because I know I didn’t really say what I meant.

Writing has never felt like that.

When I write, my thoughts finally have enough space to catch up with each other. I can stop, go back, change a word, rewrite a sentence until it finally sounds the way it already sounded inside my head. A conversation doesn’t give you that luxury.

I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. Looking back, I think that’s one of the reasons I started writing so young. It wasn’t because I dreamed of becoming a writer. It was because writing became the only place where I could fully express what was happening inside me. Years later, that same need became a book. Then it became this Artist Diary.

At one point, I spoke to a therapist about it because I’d often wondered whether I might have some form of neurodivergence. I’ve never been diagnosed, so I genuinely don’t know. She didn’t seem particularly interested in finding a label. Instead, she suggested that I try to slow my thoughts down before speaking. I understood what she meant, but if I’m honest, that’s incredibly difficult. My brain has always worked this way.

Then she said something that stayed with me. She asked me to stop thinking about it as something that needed to be fixed. I don’t think I fully understood what she meant at the time. But recently I’ve started looking at it differently.

What if the question isn’t, “Why can’t I communicate like everyone else?” What if the better question is, “What has this way of thinking allowed me to create?”

Because if my mind didn’t work like this, would I have written a book? Would I have started this blog? Would I have spent hours creating collages that somehow say exactly what I can’t explain out loud? Would music have become such an important part of how I process emotions? Would I care so much about photography, or about the way I dress, or about all the little ways we communicate without speaking?

I honestly don’t know. Maybe I’ve spent my whole life looking for different languages. Not because spoken words aren’t enough. But because sometimes they aren’t enough for me.

There’s one sentence that kept coming back to me while I was thinking about all of this. I never fell in love with writing. I fell in love with finally being understood by my own thoughts.

I’m still learning how my mind works. Maybe one day I’ll have an answer. Maybe I won’t.

But if you’ve ever felt strange because your brain doesn’t seem to communicate the way other people’s do… if you’ve ever left a conversation thinking, “That isn’t what I meant at all”… if you’ve ever found yourself expressing who you are more honestly through art, music, writing, photography or anything that doesn’t rely on spoken words… I hope you’ll know you’re not the only one.

I don’t have the answers yet. I’m still learning my own language. Maybe you’re still learning yours too.