I am a self-proclaimed linguist.

By which I mean. No one officially proclaimed me anything, and linguistics itself may wish to file a formal complaint.

I did, at one point, very seriously consider continuing my studies with a Master’s degree in linguistics. I imagined myself surrounded by heavy books on syntax, nodding thoughtfully at sentences like “Well, of course the morphosyntactic alignment…” and feeling intellectually superior at dinner parties. The dream was alive. Briefly.

Then the actual linguistics studies happened.

Somewhere down that noble academic road, I discovered that advanced grammar. Real linguistics grammar, the kind with trees, arrows, and aggressively committed brackets, was not nearly as fun as I had hoped. It turns out my passion for language does not extend to diagramming sentences until they resemble abstract art made by a deeply stressed octopus. (I prefer visualizing it in my head).

What I learned instead was something far more useful.

I don’t love language on paper.

I love it in the mouth.

I love how language sounds. How it bends. How it stumbles. How the same word can feel sharp in one accent and soft in another. I love picking up sounds, rhythms, and dialects. The musical fingerprints people carry without noticing. Put me in a room with someone long enough and my brain quietly starts trying on their vowels like outfits. I realized early on that I had a knack for imitating voices and accents, a skill that would eventually guide me toward a career as a voice-over artist. This skill doesn’t stay in a booth. It flows into my artistic practice, where I experiment with sound, rhythm, and expression across mediums.”

Grammar demands obedience.

Sounds invite play.

And I have never been very good at staying in one lane.

I have never been someone who settles for one thing. One discipline. One explanation. I need to keep learning—constantly, hungrily, sometimes chaotically. That’s simply how I function. I am curious by nature. Curious about people, about the world, about how everything works and, more importantly: How it all connects.

While formal linguistics wanted me to specialize and stay neatly within the lines, my curiosity kept wandering. Into biology. Into genetics. Because apparently understanding how we speak wasn’t enough. I also needed to know what we’re made of and why any of this exists at all.

Biology, oddly enough, made sense to me in ways advanced syntax never did. Bodies felt logical. Systems connected. Genetics felt like storytelling at a microscopic level- A language written into us. Accents of ancestry. Dialects of DNA. Suddenly, everything clicked again.

Add a degree in design and art to the mix, because of course—and I decided I was covered. 

I notice the world visually before I ever put words to it. Design taught me to see systems; art taught me to break them.

This is where I start to side-eye the modern educational system. It likes tidy boxes and clear labels. One discipline at a time. But I don’t believe knowledge works that way. I don’t believe we work that way. All disciplines interconnect, and they should. Language informs art. Biology informs design. Culture informs sound. Identity runs through everything.

Just look at the old wise men like Leonardo da Vinci and his fellow glorious overachievers. Artist. Engineer. Anatomist. Scientist. Inventor. No one told him to pick a lane, and history is better for it.

What I ended up with is not a neat academic title, but something far more useful. An unholy hybrid brain.

I design. I write. I listen. I imitate. I observe. I connect dots that were never meant to be separate. I collect languages the way some people collect stories. Not perfectly, not formally, but with affection and curiosity. I may not be able to fully explain the theoretical framework behind phonological processes, but I can hear them, feel them, and reproduce them, and honestly, that gets you surprisingly far in life.

So yes. I am a self-proclaimed linguist.

An artist.

A language lover.

A sound collector.

A multidisciplinary menace.

A grammatical dropout.

And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

Luckily, I don’t have to decide.

I get to combine it all, and keep becoming.

The Renaissance was onto something. 

Leonardo would probably approve. Or at least take notes.

-T. (Author, Interpreter and Artist).