The Manifesto of Reclaimed Language

Thursday, April 24, 2025

for those who were never meant to speak clearly

1. Language has been stripped, thinned, instrumentalized.
   What once breathed has been flattened.
   What once opened has been locked.
   Words have been trained to obey.
   To function.
   To distract.

2. But language is not a tool.
   It is a body.
   A terrain.
   A witness.
   Each word carries history, injury, possibility.
   Some tremble with too much memory.
   Some have been shamed into silence.

3. To write is not to arrange signs.
   It is to return breath to what has been dismembered.
   It is to offer a place for the spectral to land,
   for the displaced to speak,
   for the hidden to flicker again in the dark.

4. Words will not come to those who command them.
   They come to those who wait,
   who listen without wanting,
   who can hold the silence long enough for a word to feel safe.

5. Some words will choose you.
   They will arrive uninvited.
   You will not know what they mean.
   But if you stay, if you listen,
   they will reveal themselves —
   not as definitions,
   but as presences.

6. To find your voice is not to sound unique.
   It is to inhabit the language that vibrates with your structure.
   To speak from your singular place.
   And only from there.
   No borrowed fire.
   No synthetic tone.

7. To love — truly — is to allow the other to reach their own voice.
   To hold space in silence,
   to wait without pressure,
   to trust that presence alone is enough
   until the voice emerges.

8. Only when the singular finds its language,
   can the spectral speak in its own name.