Rekindling Myself: How My Second Language Took Away My Personality

From social faux pas to admin nightmares, my year abroad stripped my character down and built it up again.

Credit: Langll// Pixabay

My mother used to tell me that there’s no use bashing your head against a brick wall, ‘it doesn’t hurt the wall’. She also told me ‘don’t worry Worry until Worry worries you’. All these little phrases I have carried with me into world and are at the core of how I go about my day. It’s the way I comfort people when they’re struggling and how I empathise and relate to other people. Now that I have embarked on my year abroad and avoid speaking English as much as I can, there is a lot of linguistic empty space that I need to fill in very little time.

Finding my Place in a Foreign Language

I have studied Spanish for about a decade (seven years if you start counting when I finally paid attention). The first three years just bounced off of me like water off a duck’s back and I retained absolutely nothing despite the teachers’ best efforts. Conjugation, prepositions, colours, anything outside your basic greetings was completely lost on me.

It wasn’t until I met Miss López at 14 that I started to open up to learning a language. As a first-generation university…