Two Things Can Be True About Living in Another Language

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

Two things can be true when you live in another language.

One: you can feel a lot dumber when you are still getting a grip on a new language.

Not actually dumber, just temporarily robbed of your personality and roughly 40% of your brain.You know what you want to say. You have a perfectly reasonable thought. Perhaps even a brilliant one. And then your brain goes:

Do we know the word for that?

No.

Can we explain it another way?

Also no.

Can we just nod?

Excellent. Let's nod.

You don't have the vocabulary yet to argue properly. You can't make the joke you would normally make. You know exactly what you mean, but somehow you sound like a five-year-old who has just discovered verbs.

Two: you can become extremely fluent.

Photo of the book Parenting Unpacked by Jessica Gabrielzyk

You can discuss politics, religion, relationships, capitalism, the housing market, the meaning of life, and, I don't know, grout. You can argue. You can joke. You can work. You can flirt. You can explain why someone is completely wrong with impressive grammatical accuracy. And yet. Sometimes you just want to get cosy and talk in your own language. You speak the new one fine. You haven't forgotten a word. You could order coffee in your sleep. You just want to stop. Because as much as you don't have to do the same amount of brain gymnastics you did when you first arrived, you are still doing some. And sometimes you are tired.

Really tired.

So you want the language where you don't have to search for the word. Where the joke arrives before you have translated it. Where you can complain about your day without mentally proofreading the sentence first. Where your personality doesn't need subtitles.

Maybe that's what both things have in common.

At the beginning, the language exhausts you because you can't do enough with it. Later, it exhausts you because you can do almost everything with it. You work hard to get there and when you finally arrive there is still some work involved.

The difference is that now nobody can see it.

Sometimes not even you.

The loss of felt competence is one of the central concepts in Parenting Unpacked. Chapter 13, The Language Gap, is where that experience lives in full. The first forty pages are free. 💛

Jessica Gabrielzyk

Read the first 40 pages
Buy Parenting Unpacked
Jessica Gabrielzyk

Jessica Gabrielzyk is a Brazilian writer living in Switzerland. She moved there with her husband and daughter, who was three months old at the time and had strong opinions about the whole thing even then.

She writes about change.

The visible kind and the kind that happens inside a person, while everything on the outside looks fine.

Her first book, Maternity Abroad, explored what it means to become a mother far from the system you trusted. It has reached readers in more than fifteen countries across five continents. Parenting Unpacked, her second book, follows the experience of parenting through major life disruption, whether that's an international move, a career loss, a new baby, or a life that simply stops responding the way it used to. My First American Coloring Book was created to help toddlers engage with daily life in the United States through play and familiar imagery.

She is a member of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research, and the International Academy of Brazilian Literature.

She writes for the parent who is still inside it, getting through the day, and wondering somewhere underneath all of it who they are becoming.

When she is not writing, she is walking forty minutes uphill with a stroller, telling herself the exercise is the point.

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