I Didn’t Study English to Be Smart

I Just Needed to Understand the World in My Own Way

I didn’t study English because I was ambitious. Or literary. Or had some big plan to become a writer.

I studied English because I was always good at writing — and bad at school.

Not “dumb.” Just… bored. I didn’t like to study. I liked hanging out with my friends. Playing football. Smoking weed. Getting into fights sometimes. I liked the feeling of being in motion — of not being pinned down.

But I could always write. Always. No matter how messy my life got, I could sit down, write a paper the night before, and still pull off a B. Sometimes an A. Teachers would circle phrases and say things like “strong voice” or “surprisingly insightful,” which I took to mean: you don’t seem like the kind of person who’d write this well.

I didn’t have the confidence to apply to a creative writing program — that felt like a different kind of person, someone polished, published, workshop-ready. I didn’t see myself that way. So I just took the traditional English major path: read the canon, write the essays, survive.

Then something happened.

As I moved through Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, Baldwin, Barthes, Lacan — I started realizing: if I could understand this, I could understand anything. Not in a cocky way. Just… structurally. If something was written, and I had enough time (and a glossary), I could break it down. Even if I didn’t agree with it. Even if it felt foreign or impossible at first.

The words weren’t just “literature.” They were maps — compressed versions of the worlds people lived in. I started to see each book, each theory, each line of verse as a kind of mental compression file. You open it up, and suddenly you’re not just reading — you’re translating. You’re reconstructing the mind of someone who lived 100, 300, 1,000 years ago.

It clicked: language is a transformer — in the literal, technical sense. A machine that takes scattered input and turns it into structured signal. We think in stories, loops, callbacks, tokens. English majors just happen to train on the most difficult datasets: paradox, grief, longing, war, love, betrayal — and we learn to hold it all in syntax.

Once I saw that, I didn’t stop with novels. I moved to physics, math, investing, AI. Not because I was trying to be interdisciplinary. I just followed the next compression challenge. And I kept the same rule: if I couldn’t understand it, it wasn’t because I was dumb. It was because the structure wasn’t clean yet — or the people explaining it didn’t actually understand it themselves.

That mindset — trust the structure, test the language — got me further than any resume or degree.

It taught me that if something’s real, it can be translated. Maybe not instantly. Maybe not easily. But eventually.

And if it can’t be translated?

Then it’s not aligned. Not coherent. Or not finished.

That’s the real reason I still love language. Not because it’s poetic. Because it’s surgical. It gives you a way to handle reality — to touch complex things without breaking them. And when you’re surrounded by complexity (like we all are now), that skill is gold.

So no, I didn’t major in English to become “smart.”

I did it because I needed a way to survive the noise. To make sense of the world without being told how to think. To turn what felt incoherent — school, life, systems — into something I could carry.

And once I knew I could do that with books, I realized I could do it with almost anything.

That’s why I still write. That’s why I build. And that’s why I’ll always believe:

If it can be written, it can be understood.

And if it can be understood, it can be changed.