There are two things I know for sure.
I am the oldest version of myself I have ever been. And I know more about culture, beliefs and other people's points of view than I have ever known.
You would think that would make me confident. More years, more experience, more knowledge, so surely I should be getting better at explaining what I think.
Instead, I have become much harder to interview. Ask me about almost anything and you will get a short answer, a long pause or a lecture no one quite asked for.
The reason is simple. The more I learn, the harder it is to react in a straight line. Someone says something and I have an immediate reaction. Then a second thought arrives, then a third, and my brain calls a committee meeting. Where did that belief come from? What does this person mean by that word? Am I reacting to what they said or to what I think they meant? And what if I am missing something?
I miss the days when I could have an opinion without a footnote.
Living across countries made it worse
Living across countries has shown me that what feels obvious in one place is unfamiliar somewhere else. I have seen it in language, parenting, family traditions and ordinary conversations. What I read as rude, someone else calls direct. What I see as confidence, someone else reads as arrogance. A parenting decision that seems reasonable to me makes another parent wonder what on earth I am doing. Neither of us is making a statement about culture. We are both doing what we learned was normal.
The more I study intercultural communication, the more I see behind a simple exchange. Words come with histories, and beliefs come with origins. People inherit ideas without knowing where they came from, and even the things we call personal preferences are shaped by the home we grew up in.
So I have started asking about the question behind the opinion. I want to understand what I am actually responding to. That makes conversations longer than anyone expected.
Understanding someone does not mean agreeing
I can understand why someone believes something and still think the belief causes harm. I can see the cultural context behind a behaviour without excusing it. I can question my own reading without deciding that the other person's must be right.
Two positions in conversations about culture annoy me. One assumes that our own way of seeing things is the obvious and universal one. The other says that because culture shapes everything, nobody should judge anything. Neither gets us far.
Knowing more about culture has not given me a formula for choosing the right response. It has made me pay attention before I choose one. Some differences deserve curiosity. Others deserve a disagreement, and a few need a very clear line.
The oldest version of myself
At eighteen I thought I knew quite a lot. I had opinions about people, countries, relationships and how life should work, and I could explain them very confidently.
Then I moved abroad. I learned languages, lived in different countries, made friends whose lives looked nothing like mine, became a mother and studied intercultural communication. Things I had considered normal started to look like cultural habits, and things I had dismissed as strange started to make sense.
Learning also changed what I thought I already knew. You learn about one culture and realise you misunderstood your own. You listen to someone's experience and see that the same event can mean completely different things.
And the answer you were about to give needs another twenty minutes.
I still have opinions, plenty of them, and I will defend them. I have values and boundaries, and some things I challenge without calling a meeting first. What I no longer do is try to win an argument before I know what it is about. I ask people what they mean. I reconsider my first reading. I say, "I do not know enough about this to give you a confident answer," which has turned out to be a very useful sentence.
That sentence does not mean I have no opinion. It means mine needs more work before I hand it to you.
So, what do I know?
Two things. I am the oldest version of myself I have ever been, and I know more about culture than I ever have. Yet I find it harder to explain what I think in a straight line. I see more context and notice more assumptions, and I can imagine several explanations for the same situation. Sometimes I catch myself before saying something I would have to explain for the next half hour.
I cannot say whether that makes me wiser. I hope it makes me more careful.
So if you ask me something and I take a little longer to answer, I am probably deciding which of the twenty things I could say is useful to you.
Has learning more about the world made you more certain of your opinions, or has it made you question them more often?
Jessica Gabrielzyk
