I was recently asked the question, do you feel free?
At first, the answer seemed obvious—of course I feel free. I moved halfway across the world because I wanted to. I wanted to be able to draw, so I signed up for art classes and learned.
However, as I give this question room to breathe, I’m realizing that there are areas in which I often constrain myself—particularly when I’m meeting new people or in large group settings. Some of this is the result of one too many cultural inputs: Southern warm-but-indirect meets Midwest nice-but-distant meets Western European quickly-bored-with-pleasantries, and I struggle to find the balance between them. Perhaps the more important aspect, though, is that I somehow want to “succeed” in my social interactions. Oldest daughter syndrome claims another victim.
An additional complicating factor is language. My relationships with many of my closest friends have been built in their second language and my first. Excitingly, I’m increasingly taking the opportunity to get to know people in my second language. After more than ten years of effort—from high school French and AP tests, to university exchange and living with a host mom, to now living in a French-speaking shared house—I finally feel able to claim a hesitant fluency in French. I can’t always understand 100% of what people say to me, nor can I always find the exact words I’m looking for; but frankly, I can’t do either of these things in English either.
While I speak French often, I usually do so in informal contexts as opposed to professional ones. At the start of the month, I got a chance to do the latter, traveling to a conference for French non-profit housing providers for my work. I went as the sole staff member of my organization, and I was nervous. The environment in Brussels is so multilingual that you can just drop a word from another language into your sentences if you lose the word in the language you’re speaking. I figured that I probably couldn’t do this in an extremely French environment (an assumption proven right when I did try out of desperation). All told, the unintentional pressure I put on my interactions combined with my middling capacity to express myself made the prospect of networking with a bunch of strangers nerve-wracking.
Strangely, by lunchtime on the first day, after I’d warmed up with a few coffees and first conversations, these two factors weren’t converging in the way I’d anticipated. Instead of overthinking my words, I had to simply jump in with the words I had. All I could do was my best within my capacity, which had a clear maximum threshold. Instead of being intimidated, I was surprised to find myself at ease.
I walked right up to people to introduce myself, asked questions during presentations, and held my own in conversations with people far more experienced than myself. Sometimes it was awkward. Sometimes I tripped over my own tongue (r’s can be particularly difficult). When this happened, though, I didn’t feel like I’d failed.
Operating in my second language created space from the core of myself. It freed me to exist in a new, intimidating space without feeling so personally implicated within it. My brain did feel like it was made of soup at the end of the conference, and I needed some major alone time over the next few days to recharge. Still, I felt as if I’d unlocked this secret new skill. I’ve appreciated the ability of languages to give us new perspectives on the world since a socio-linguistic obsession brought on by Arrival—but I’d never thought about how another language could give me a new perspective on myself.
It’s hard to find the right words to convey the freedom that I experienced in these two days. This liberation felt very day-to-day, like I was relaxing into myself with a little bit of distance. The small amount of space created took me out of my internal review process and actually made me feel more present.
I’m not certain how to hold onto this feeling and to import it into my English interactions, but I do intend to try. Stay tuned to see what I become when my Dutch gets better!
Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.
