We are encouraged more and more to keep in touch with our bodies and do a quick scan each day to see how it feels. 🤔 Wouldn't it be useful to do a similar check to our multilingual living from time to time? Here's some inspiration on how to do this.
Beyond the joy of seeing each other again and finally spending time together in person, my bi-anual encounters with my family in my native country offer me a mirror of where I am now. Their surprise in hearing me say or do things that I didn’t agree with the last time we met guides me in seeing my inner changes more clearly. Our discussions on such topics, where we sometimes cannot find common ground, shed light to the areas where my thoughts and attitudes aren’t mature yet and that are worth having a closer look at (or patience to find their way naturally).
The same happens to me when meeting friends I hadn’t been in touch with lately or with whom I hadn’t tackled certain topics for a while. The dissimilarities between us are more visible to me when I encounter people with a different lifestyle and living environment. In this case, our current guiding principles lead us sometimes to even opposite directions. I’m always surprised and often hurt to notice our current discrepancies. With time, I’ve taught myself to focus on what this experience reveals about the “most recent me”.
Multilinguals living abroad go through so many changes and need to constantly re-tailor several aspects of their life, but there is seldom the time and place to stop and think about it. And the danger here is that we unexpectedly get into a conversation, where in the end we feel that a “foreign” person is talking to our dear ones. What did you do to Corina?, You have changed a lot! or I never though you would support this idea! This is a sample of the reactions I often get in such situations. Which immediately lead me into thinking: Where did these thoughts come from?, Did I really believe the opposite some time ago?, Have I really changed that much? – If so, when and how did it happen without me noticing it? And, eventually, the most daring question: Who am I now?
Taking a good look in the mirror, especially when someone else is holding it in front of us, is often an unpleasant and sometimes an even scary experience. From my experience, it is also an essential one for learning where we are right now and not stuck in some memories. Thus, we can notice what we have newly acquired, what we prefer to leave behind and what we consciously choose to build further upon.
Living multilingually is a lot more than just juggling with more languages. By learning and using another language, we access not only new vocabulary and a distinct grammar structure, but we take on specific cultural aspects and thus our attitude towards the world and its diversity shifts. Therefore, we constantly incorporate changes that we are frequently not aware of. And we usually notice them when we encounter our old selves, as they are encapsulated in the memories of our loved ones and their emerging expectations of us.
Do we like what we learn about our “latest self”? Then it’s a keeper. Do we want to polish it here and there? Let’s do this! Does this make us different than the people that matter to us? Sure, but we have always been somehow different than them, there was just no mirror to point it out to us before. It’s so fortunate that we now have it and we can use it to get to know ourselves better!
So let’s embrace our individual multilingual identity and the insightful journey it brings along!
Yours confidently,
Corina