For All the Words I Never Said

Where do our words go when we do not say them? (Photo Credit: Fernanda Sánchez)

Sometimes, the only thing I wanted was to become small enough to enter the dark space of my card. 

I was in Brazil, sitting in a Canadian school, trying to learn how to read and write in two languages at once: Portuguese and English. I looked around, and all the kids had finished their English lesson. While I saw letters dancing in front of me. I watched my friend draw some kind of animal, so I just copied it and showed it to the teacher.

She smiled and asked me, “What animal is that?” I could not answer. I had no idea. Her eyes turned furious; she gave me a lecture about how bad it was to copy someone else’s work. If I could, I would have sung, “Words, they don’t come easy to me…” I was six.  

This difficulty with reading and writing led me to a private teacher who patiently helped me put this difficult puzzle together. With images, a little love and attention, she made words click into my mind, almost like magic.

I cannot remember her name, not even her face, but I feel deeply grateful to her.  Especially because my parents were getting a divorce, and I needed to go to the court to say that “I” wanted to stay with my father, while my heart was clearly saying both. 

For a long time, words felt like something that belonged to other people. They were external. They lived in books, songs, and classrooms, but not inside me. I never imagined that language would one day become the centre of my life. Now, words follow me everywhere.  Or to be more precise, I follow them.  

I often think about the words we never say, and how they impact us. Because I have felt the power of unspoken words. They occupy a space between silence and expression. They remain suspended, waiting, and often return later in unexpected, and sometimes ugly, forms.  

I sometimes wonder if unspoken words were the source of a hip injury that almost made me stop dancing. 

For almost two years, I felt a sharp pain in my left hip that I ignored, because I was training for a competition.  Maybe the words I had never said had accumulated inside my hip, to force me to look at myself and question what was really worth it, telling me to listen to myself. Still, through all the pain, I competed as if there were no tomorrow, and on that occasion, I learned to dance and communicate with myself, and not only to others. I paid a high price this lesson: the doctors said I might not be able to dance again.

After some time, the pain disappeared, but I remember that while I was still recovering, I felt a little useless and bored, and one quiet night, I decided to write a short story about an old lady who sees words falling off her book and slipping into her tea. Afraid to lose them, she drinks the tea, so the words stay inside her.

That night, letters spread across her skin, and tangled phrases rise inside her until she almost suffocates. By the morning, she understands something simple and terrifying: words were never meant to be stored. When she finally begins to write, she realizes the words were already inside her,  and the chaos quiets down. The tornado of words stops attacking her. They find a place outside her body, on the page, where they can exist without destroying her.  

When I could not speak for myself,  and I felt like this old lady,  I relied on poetry and music. The Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso says language carries memory:  “Gosto de sentir a minha língua roçar na língua de Camões.”  (I like to feel my tongue brush against Camões' tongue). 

Today, I would say we are touching histories that came before us. During high school, a teacher who marked me deeply used to say: “A língua pertence ao falante.”  (Language belongs to the speaker).  It is the kind of phrase that only becomes clear later.  Language tells stories about us long before we consciously decide what to say. It is part of our identity.  

We might imagine that speech is something we control completely, but every sentence we form is mediated by culture, history, and experience. Words are never neutral. They come from somewhere.  

That is why listening carries such importance. I was bullied in school for many years, like so many others. The kids would always pick on me, not only in a physical way. What hurt the most was being excluded and deprived of speaking,  the fear of opening my mouth, of showing my teeth when laughing at something simple.  

It took me years to get the confidence to laugh again.   

In a painful way, this taught me that listening is more than simply hearing words. It is a way of stepping, even briefly, into another person’s inner landscape. When we listen, we take on the quiet responsibility of receiving someone else’s story. I was lucky to encounter people willing to hold my words. They showed me that listening is a form of presence; it requires attention, patience, and openness. 

I was fortunate to find someone willing to listen to me.   

Our words belong to us and only us, but they only fully exist when someone else receives them. As the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade suggests, we must “enter quietly into the kingdom of words.” Language is not something we possess; it is something we approach with care.  

I now speak five languages. Each time I learned a new one, I accessed a new world. I learned English almost alongside my mother tongue, Portuguese. Spanish was my third, introduced in the 6^th grade curriculum; Italian came with my citizenship and necessity to travel without being treated badly as a foreigner, and as a lost child in South America searching for my roots. I learned French out of curiosity and self-taught dedication.  

After the difficult work of learning vocabulary, grammar, and overcoming the fear of speaking, words stop behaving like translations and start becoming experiences. I could speak with friends in their native languages, making them feel more comfortable and respected. A phrase that once sounded foreign slowly becomes familiar. A joke finally makes sense. A song begins to feel different because you understand the words that once passed unnoticed. I remember crying while listening to “Voilà” sung by Emma Kok when I could finally feel its meaning without struggling to understand it.  

This taught me that learning a language is about perception. Each language carries its own rhythm, its own way of naming emotions, and its own silences. Some things are easy to say in one language and almost impossible in another. It makes me sad to think about languages that have disappeared; they are like ghosts.  

In my life, languages multiplied slowly. What began as an academic exercise became something personal. I met people from different cultures, and the world expanded with each “hi,” “konnichiwa,” “ciao,” “salut,” “oi,” “hola,” and “hej.” But I was not exactly the same person in each one. My thoughts move differently. Some ideas come more naturally in one language than another. Sometimes, words disappear entirely. Even in my mother tongue, they can feel too heavy to say. In those moments, I transform them into art, a painting, a poem, or a precise ballet step.  

It was with this awareness of how we carry ourselves that I found myself at a restaurant in downtown Fredericton, just before Christmas, when someone caught my attention. She irritated me slightly. At first, I thought it was simply her personality, but as I watched her speak, something else became clear.  

She was Brazilian, like me, but trying very hard to appear Canadian. The way she spoke, the expressions she used, even the way she carried herself felt carefully adjusted, as if she were trying to erase where she came from. But the traces remained. The rhythm of her gestures was slightly exaggerated. The familiar sound of certain vowels slipping through. Even the sandals she was wearing: “Havaianas.”  

I thought about that moment for a long time because it revealed something I had been circling: language always carries a history, even when we try to hide it. She was using words to pretend, to build a new identity, but at least she was bringing words to life. I began to wonder what happens when language is used without any lived history at all.  

Today, artificial intelligence can generate language that is an illusion of human speech. It mimics language like the girl in the restaurant pretending to belong. But unlike that girl, it has no history to rely on. Is AI having an identity crisis, given that it does not have one to begin with?  

This tool is capable of generating sentences, imitating styles, and even simulating emotion. It can sound convincing. But these words do not come from a classroom where reading once felt impossible. They do not come from a body that held pain when something could not be said. They do not come from nights of curiosity or silence that slowly became unbearable.  

One of my favourite writers is novelist Clarice Lispector, who often described language as a profoundly human effort. Her writing circles around the limits of words, revealing how difficult it can be to translate inner experience into sentences.  

AI appears to be an easy and tempting solution for this problem, but we need to understand that we write because something inside us insists on being expressed. We speak because silence eventually becomes unbearable. Even when language feels insufficient, it remains our most powerful tool for reaching one another. AI will never be able to do this for us.  

For a long time, I let others write my story.  I do not want AI to do the same thing. I do not want AI to decide the best word choices for my life. We can stand up for ourselves. We can hear each other and hold what belongs to us.   

What I know is that unspoken words do not disappear at all.

They remain somewhere inside us, waiting for the moment when they can finally be understood. They might reappear years later in a conversation, in a piece of writing, in a dance, in a song, or in a work of art made by our hands, body, and soul. They might reappear if they are not well treated in the hip, throat or even in the heart. 

And come in a third way that is more active: it is when they become movement.   

I spent my whole life preparing to study abroad. I attended a Canadian school for twelve years, preparing for English proficiency exams instead of the much-feared ENEM, the national university exam in Brazil. While everyone else was panicking over those fifty multiple-choice questions covering every high school subject, I was terrified that my chemistry grades would affect my university choices abroad.  

I took the ENEM, FUVEST, the highly competitive exam for the University of São Paulo, and other entrance exams at the same time I applied to several Canadian universities. I was accepted to all of them, but my heart and mind were at war. Was studying abroad truly my dream, or was it my family’s choice?  

I was standing in front of the famous stairs of Cásper Líbero when I received an email saying I had been accepted to the University of Toronto with a partial scholarship. Tears rolled down my face; the happiness was genuine, but also the concern for my future. I waited for every single response before deciding. St. Thomas University was my favourite option; I checked the website every day until I saw that green "Approved" certificate. Because I really wanted a small class environment, and it was one of the most affordable options in Canada. With my New Brunswick high school certificate, I was eligible for discounts. Also, the city seemed to be calm, peaceful and a great place to start fresh.   

Some offers arrived late, like Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, a prestigious name among private universities, but I was not interested anymore. I already had enough to think about. With a final surge of courage, I chose my favourite option.  

On August 31st, I landed at (YFC), the small airport in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on the coast of Canada. I was surprised by the cultural differences: the small city, the silence, and the nature. I loved the flowers, the sun, and the art, but most importantly, the people were so polite and kind. I felt welcomed immediately.  

The first week felt like a paradise until my grandma had to leave. I watched the taxi get further and further from the St. Thomas University sign and could not hold the tears anymore. I went to my room, cried for exactly two hours, washed my face, and went out to explore. I went to a ballet school because that was the only thing I was sure about. I met the director at the door; I entered as a shy, weak child and went out with a teaching job. I never imagined that would be possible. My throat was full of words, but I finally transformed them into movement.  

My world expanded as English stopped being exhausting and classes became routine. I found friends who left a mark on me. I found love, and I found myself. I realized that while my past shaped who I am, it does not determine who I can become.   

Canada gave me the safety to experience adulthood, the freedom of walking kilometres without a destination and the responsibility of navigating a life in a new language. I had to learn the vocabulary of real life: calling the bank, a phone company, and understanding a SIN card. Every time things get difficult, I remember that the privilege of being able to make mistakes so far from home is a privilege.

I took all the words I never said and turned them into movement, into search, and into dreams.