The languages we write with

I’ve always written. As a child, I wrote in Finnish, but when I grew up, I began to write in Swedish too. Writing in Swedish was a way to get nearer my mother, who spoke Swedish better than Finnish, a means to understand her and her thoughts and feelings better.

A girl wants to be like her mother.

I grew up to my height as a teen-ager, learned how to speak French and German, but it was impossible to write in these languages. I liked to speak French, I liked to listen to it, but to write French became a horror for me. Same happened with German.

English. It has always been easy for me to learn English, it sounded familiar from the beginning, thanks to the movies I had watched from the early childhood. Laurel and Hardy, John Wayne, Julie Andrews and Peter O’Toole taught me to understand English.

It still feels natural for me to write in English and it puzzles me a little. My thoughts are mostly in Finnish and if writing is a documentation of ones thoughts, desire, hopes and life, why don’t I write only in Finnish?

Or could it be, that writing has no language? Is it only a state of mind?