The Lip Twirl.

Oh gosh. I can still picture it.

I moved to Australia in my early twenties and barely had the confidence to open my mouth. When I talked, people were trying to understand my accent and not quite getting there. I do not think it was painful to hear me exactly. It was more like they were trying. Their lips would twirl while their eyes squinted. Like that would magically give me subtitles or something.

I kept learning. Just not at the speed most people seemed to expect. People would say to me: “but you have been living there for three months, you must be fluent by now.” Hun. Not quite yet. I have been learning a language, not learning magic.

So I went to university. And trust me when I say: pure gold acting. I got my IELTS score with what I can only describe as a miracle and the fact that I am Brazilian and make jokes under stress. I did not score amazingly in any of the sections except speaking. Ironically. My English was not great but I made the examiner laugh and I am assuming that is how I got the score high enough to go to university.

But boy did that bite me. Too many times to count.

The biggest one I still remember was in year three or so, presenting in front of over a hundred students. Was I good at presenting and was my English any good? Maybe better now on both counts but definitely not then. I remember one local student with the heart of gold helping me with the preparation, staying with me through the anxiety of it without making me feel like a problem. Years later I ran into him again and he said your English is much better. That made me feel slightly happier. But I was not a native and sounding like a native was what had been carved into my brain since boarding the plane. You keep hearing that you will not belong until you sound like them, and I took that by heart.

Years later I got my citizenship. The lip twirl did not care about my citizenship.

I got a job in marketing and I was scared as hell to answer a phone call. I would sweat my ass off every single time.

But then I decided to travel and work remotely. That is when things changed.

No body language to read, no faces to watch for early warning signs of the lip twirl coming. Just a phone, a voice, and the ceiling I was being asked to push my speaking toward every single day.

And then it clicked.

When there is no room to read a face or soften a misunderstanding with a smile, you learn to carry the whole conversation yourself. You slow down. You articulate. You stop rushing past the difficult sounds and start sitting inside them long enough to get them right. You stop performing fluency and start actually building it.

Baby me in Brisbane.

My speaking improved more in those months than it had in years of being in the room with people.

And somewhere in that process I arrived at something I had not expected.

The accent was never the problem. Clarity was.

These are two completely different things and confusing them costs years. The accent is the specific music of where you come from. Clarity is making sure that music actually arrives. You can have a strong accent and speak with complete clarity. You can have a native accent and mumble your way through every conversation. The two things are not the same and the lip twirl, well-intentioned as it was, had taught me to conflate them.

I do not conflate them anymore.

But I want to be honest about something else. I hated to be corrected. Genuinely hated it. Looking back I think it was because of how much I wanted to belong, and every correction felt like a clear marker in my head that I was not one of them. I hated it so much that it took me forever to speak English in front of my now husband. I was protecting something. The version of me that might sound like she knew what she was doing, if nobody tested it too hard.

That may or may not be happening with French now. Unconsciously. But I know the other side now. I just need to go through it.

That is the inherited scorecard doing its worst work, a standard absorbed before you were old enough to choose it, measuring you against a version of fluency that was never your native language and never will be, and telling you the lip twirl means something true about you rather than something true about the moment.

Those looks and lip twirls, even friendly and unconscious, dictated how I felt about the place and about myself for years. They say nothing about me now. I am a pain in the ass, proud, and do not stop talking.

The lip twirl was never about my accent. It was about a moment of unfamiliarity in the other person. And that is their experience to have, not my problem to solve.

I just needed about ten years and a pandemic to figure that out.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

The inherited scorecard is one of the central concepts in Parenting Unpacked, where it appears in a different context but with the same mechanism. The beliefs we absorb before we are old enough to question them run longest when nobody names them.

If you are raising a child who is arriving somewhere new and will need to navigate a world that does not yet know their name, My First American Coloring Book gives them the visual vocabulary before the world expects them to already have it.

And if you are the parent who held everything together through every country and somewhere in the middle of it stopped recognising yourself, Maternity Abroad and Parenting Unpacked were written for exactly that. Both available now on Amazon worldwide. 💛