I'm Not the Worst Person. Maybe Just Not Funny to You.

The Things Nobody Names.
Written By Jessica Gabrielzyk

I am not Ricky Gervais. I want to be clear about that upfront.

I make jokes under stress. Brazilians do that. It is practically a cultural reflex, the same way we also hug strangers and talk too loud in quiet places and treat every meal like a small celebration even if it is just a bowl of oatmeal Stress arrives and the joke follows automatically, before I have had time to decide if this is the right room for it.

It is usually not the right room.

I knew this about myself before I moved countries. My personality was already not for everyone in Brazil. Too much, too fast, slightly miscalibrated for the moment, the joke landing wrong at a funeral or a tense work meeting, in the exact second when someone needed me to be serious and I offered them something sideways instead.

And then I moved. Australia first. Then Portugal. Then Ireland. Then Switzerland. All of them countries where the humour is wry and dry and arrives so deadpan you are not sure it happened. Where funny is a thing you sneak up on rather than announce. Where the best joke is the one that takes three seconds to land and makes no noise when it does.

I lived in those places long enough to absorb the register. Long enough that when I go back to Brazil now, I do not come across as warm. I come across as distant. The Brazilian instinct reads me as cold. The Swiss context reads me as too much. I am somewhere in the middle, fluent in neither, slightly off in both, making jokes at the wrong speed for every room I walk into.

This is identity migration in its most personal form. Not the loss of felt competence in a supermarket aisle or the inherited scorecard measuring you against a version of yourself that made sense somewhere else. This is losing the register of your own personality across contexts. Finding out that the thing you thought was just you is actually you plus the specific cultural soil you grew in, and that soil does not travel the way you thought it did.

I am not funnier in English or warmer in Portuguese. I am just myself, which turns out to be a culturally specific product that does not translate cleanly into any of the places I have actually lived.

Ricky Gervais would probably find this funny.

I am still working on it.

Jessica Gabrielzyk

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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