The Grief of Not Being Fully Yourself in Another Language
There is so much of me that you can’t see because I don’t always have the words.
This morning at the gym, a man took weights from the machine I was clearly using. If you go to the gym, you know there is a basic etiquette: don’t take weights from someone else’s machine, put your own weights away, throw away your used tissues. None of this should need explaining.
When I protested in French, he waved me off. But I persisted. Eventually, he put the weights back. When I finished, I made a small performance of moving those same weights onto his machine. He didn’t appreciate it, but he got the point.
It has taken me years to reach the point where, when I am angry or upset, I no longer worry about perfect grammar or my accent. I know the message is coming across. More importantly, I know when I’m right.
But standing up for yourself in another language is hard, especially when emotions are involved. I still swear under my breath in American, New-York-style English when I need to. And I remember what it was like when I was younger and still learning French: the frustration of trying to find words when feelings ran high, the temptation to answer in English, the tears that sometimes came before the sentence did.
That small encounter stayed with me because it reminded me of something larger: you can live in a country for years and still have moments when you suddenly feel like a child.
Not because you don’t know how to function. You do. You can make appointments, deal with the bank, talk to the plumber, navigate the supermarket, understand your doctor. Perhaps you work in the language. Perhaps you even dream in it sometimes.
By all ordinary measures, you are doing fine. And then something happens: someone dismisses you, hurts you, or puts you in a situation where you need to explain something complicated and urgent.
Suddenly, the language that seemed perfectly adequate five minutes ago is no longer enough. You know what you want to say. You just can’t say it quite the way you mean it.
Functional fluency is not emotional fluency
One of the strange things about living abroad is that language competence can be uneven. You may be perfectly capable of functioning in your new language while still feeling profoundly limited in certain situations.
You can discuss your electricity bill but not your heartbreak. You can understand a work meeting but struggle to explain why something upset you. You can make small talk for an hour but search desperately for the right words when the conversation becomes personal.
Functional fluency is not the same as emotional fluency. The language we use to navigate everyday life is not always the language we use to understand ourselves.
Missing the self you are in your own language
Our first language is not simply a collection of words. It is the language in which we were comforted, scolded, praised, embarrassed, frightened, and reassured. It carries family jokes, childhood arguments, old expressions, and the particular ways people around us talked about love, disappointment, shame, illness, and sadness.
We don’t just learn vocabulary. We learn an emotional vocabulary. And when we move to another country, we may discover that this vocabulary does not automatically come with us.
There is something poignant about the French expression je ne trouve pas mes mots: I can’t find my words. Sometimes that is literally what is happening. But sometimes the problem is not that you don’t know enough French. The problem is that the feeling itself lives somewhere else.
You may know exactly what you want to say in your first language, but in your new language the sentence becomes flatter. Less precise. Less funny. Less angry. Less tender. You say ça va because explaining that it doesn’t really go well would take ten minutes and several attempts.
Becoming less articulate
One of the most frustrating aspects of living in another language is that it can temporarily change your sense of who you are. Perhaps you were articulate in your home country: funny, quick, sarcastic, persuasive, someone who always knew what to say.
And now you sometimes feel slow. You think of the perfect response hours later. You understand the joke five seconds too late. You let things go because correcting someone feels like too much effort. Or you become more direct than you would normally be because you don’t have the linguistic resources to soften what you’re saying.
You are not less articulate. But other people do not always have access to the version of you that exists in your first language. And that can feel like a small but persistent loss.
Living between languages
This may be one of the less obvious forms of expat grief: missing the self you are in your own language. The person who can tell a story effortlessly. The person whose humour everyone understands. The person who knows exactly how to express irritation without sounding aggressive. The person who does not have to translate.
You are still that person. But your new environment may not always have access to them. There can be a quiet grief in that.
Over time, something else happens too. You begin to acquire new ways of expressing yourself. You discover words that do not have quite the same meaning in your first language. You develop a sense of humour in your new language. You may even become a slightly different version of yourself.
That does not mean one language is the “real” you and the other is fake. Living between languages can expand us. We can become more than one thing. But expansion does not eliminate loss. Both can be true: you can love your new life and miss the ease of your old language. You can be fluent and still sometimes feel lost.
Perhaps the goal is not perfect translation
Maybe becoming at home in another language means accepting that something will always be slightly different. Some things will be lost. Other things will be gained. Some jokes will not translate. Some feelings will require explanation. And gradually, if you give yourself enough time, you may develop new words for parts of yourself that did not previously have names.
That is not failure. It is part of becoming a person who belongs in more than one place.
So if you find yourself unexpectedly tired, frustrated, or homesick, perhaps what you miss is not only a place. Perhaps you are missing the version of yourself who never had to search for the words.
And perhaps that deserves a little compassion. Because sometimes the hardest part of living in another country is not learning how to speak the language. It is learning how to be yourself in it.
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