I feel stupider here.
I can’t say the things I want to say in Spanish, so I end up saying much simpler things – making the kinds of observations (about life, politics, whatever) that felt like revelations ten or fifteen years ago, but now seem ho-hum.
All that energy that it takes to figure out how to even approximate what I want to say in Spanish – plus the effort of actually saying it – tends to crowd out the subtler and more interesting thoughts that I’d wanted to say in the first place. While I’m in the midst of a conversation in Spanish, those thoughts actually feel less accessible, farther away, and more elusive. It feels like I’m actually thinking simpler, more basic thoughts.
And that feeling gets reinforced. Because I’m saying simpler things, people end up saying, “Of course” a lot. (The word here – “claro” – is actually more wounding to the ego. It feels condescending, partly because it sounds like ‘clearly’ – which is hard to use non-pompously – and partly because it’s often delivered in a clipped, let’s-move-on kind of way. You just said something obvious. We have nothing to add.)
* * *
I’m also realizing how hard it is to make jokes. Jokes are deep; seeing someone tell a good one is like dropping a plumb line into a culture and watching it fall forever. The quickness, the capacity to spot double meanings and do something interesting with them, that half-degree twist from normal discourse into absurdity – all of that takes a subtlety of feeling and expressiveness that I’m nowhere near. So I tend to resort to more physical humor – gestures and impressions and acting-out. Which, of course, reinforces the whole feeling-like-a-nine-year-old thing.
I’ve been through this before – learning German in Berlin, slopping through Vietnamese in Hanoi, and causing nine-car Swahili pileups in Dar es Salaam. And I think the reason it’s been so trying each time – painful isn’t too strong a word – is that I identify myself so heavily with my capacity to express my thoughts and feelings. I’m often at my best – both intellectually and emotionally/psychologically – in conversation. There’s not really much more going on inside; I offer up whatever’s in my head, and I take a bit of pride in doing so with economy and – occasionally – elegance.
In other words, I often think of myself as my thoughts and feelings, and in no small part as the thoughts and feelings that actually find expression. (The stuff floating around my brain is often unarticulated; it’s in conversation that the premonitory, intuitive, ethereal stuff inside finds shape, form, and definition.)
There are plenty of problems with this way of self-identifying, of course. But the pride I’ve taken in being good at articulating my thoughts has always tempted me to kick the can down the road a little longer. Now I’m in a place where that won’t do.
