Between Two Languages

I’ve mostly written this blog in English because English is the internet’s default setting.

If you want reach, you write in the language that’s already everywhere. Writing in English gave me a bigger audience than I’d ever get if I stayed strictly in Portuguese. I’ve had readers from places I never expected, and that still feels cool.

But here’s the catch: Portuguese is home.

It’s my native language. It’s where my jokes land better, where my anger sounds more honest, where my softer moments don’t feel like they’re being translated into a polite version of themselves. When I write in English, I can do it, but I’m always filtering. Simplifying. Flattening edges so the point survives the language barrier.

And I think about the people I’m accidentally leaving out.

Most Brazilians don’t read English. That’s not an insult. So if I write only in English, I’m essentially deciding that friends, family, and anyone who shares the cultural context I’m actually writing from can’t easily engage with it.

That’s the part that feels stupidly ironic. A lot of what I write is rooted in being Brazilian, in living abroad, in the tension between cultures. And yet I’ve often told those stories in a language that most Brazilians won’t read.

The obvious solution is “do i18n properly”. Sure. It’s also a time sink.

I’m not building a product, but writing a blog. I don’t want to spend evenings tweaking configs, managing translations, and turning this into a mini software project just so I can feel tidy about language tags. My primary goal here has always been to write more, not to get bogged down in website mechanics.

But writing in both languages without a formal setup can feel messy. People like consistency, and part of me hates the idea of a feed where one post is in English and the next is in Portuguese with no warning.

Then again, I keep coming back to the same question whether is that minor mess worth it if it means I’m actually talking to the people I keep thinking about?

Visibility is the other voice in my ear. English gets discovered more easily. Sharing, search, all of it. Portuguese narrows the funnel. And yes, I don’t write for external validation, but I’m also not made of stone. It helps to know something you wrote landed somewhere.

Still, sometimes Portuguese pulls hard. It’s the language my thoughts show up in first. It feels less like performing and more like speaking.

So here’s the compromise: I’ll write in both when it makes sense. At the end of the day, the goal is to keep writing.