When I was 23, I thought my English was pretty good.
I had read it, written it, passed the exams. Then I landed in Florida on an exchange programme and had to introduce myself to a big room of students and professors. Nothing complicated, just some basic facts about myself and my motivations. So I thought I could wing it.
I could not. I stumbled on the simplest words. I heard myself become slower and smaller in real time. I had walked into the room confident enough, and left it wounded. Both confidence and capability felt smaller than when I had arrived.
That self filled out eventually. English-me exists now, and he turned out to be the one I like best. Not because he is the most capable, more because he feels most free. Norwegian-me came with everything attached. The dialect that places me on a map, the stereotypes that come with it, and a quieter baggage underneath. Quiet kid, glasses, from a middle-class religious family, the sort who does well in school and badly at parties. That kind of shy boy grows up with something to prove, and Norwegian-me spent time proving it. With women for a while. And for years in consulting, surrounded by other insecure over-achievers. English-me inherited little of that. He started as an adult, without the same script. Much of the move from the old corporate person toward something more exploratory happened in English. The new language was an emptier room.
Norwegian-me is still the one with the most layers. The people who have known me since I was small, the jokes that land without explanation. The most range perhaps, because it had the most time, in the formative years. Deep, but inherited.
Then there is Spanish-me. I like practising, I like the language. I thought I would be fluent by now and I am not. The problem is not vocabulary. It is that I often cannot be a person in Spanish. I can do transactions. I can be smiling and likeable. I rarely can be funny, or sharp, or quiet in an interesting way. At the start that was fine. Being the newcomer who speaks like a baby was part of me then, and it suited the moment. But I am not new anymore. The language never caught up with the life I was building, and so there is a version of me here that still feels like a beginner.
My friend and Spanish teacher Manu has a theory. He thinks a language leans in the direction of its people, and the subjunctive is the giveaway. It is the mood for things that are not quite real. Wishes, doubts, parallel possibilities. A whole grammatical mood built to talk about the universe that is not. Spanish, he says, is the language of dreamers. I don't know if the science backs this, but I like the idea. Spanish-me dreams more. He imagines where the other two state. I cannot tell whether that is the language pulling me toward it or just me running slower because the words are not there yet.
So three versions of me, each with different humour, different restraint, different ages. Each with a different size of room to live in.
We all know this. You are one person at work and another with friends and another with your mother on the phone. What caught me was not that the versions differ. It was how. I assumed the difference was manner, with the same person as the base. Just different settings, the volume up or down. That is not what I find. Spanish-me is a smaller person. Less funny, less quick, less able to surprise himself. The change is not in the manner. It is in the size.
Researchers ran the trolley problem with bilingual participants in their native language and in their second one. A train will kill five people. You can stop it by pushing a heavy man off a bridge. One dies, five live. In their native language most people refused. In their second language more were willing to push. Same person, same dilemma, different emotional distance.
This identity tetris also feeds some creativity, enabling small creations that exist in the gaps between the three. A small bilingual booklet of café conversations, where neither the Spanish nor the English version is the original. The vocabulary app Boquerón, feeding the youngest version of me. None of them belong to any one of the three. The two or three of us made them together.
Maybe the part worth thinking about is this, whether or not you have ever struggled in another language; The story we often believe is that there is a real you underneath, one stable version, and the work-you and the phone-with-mom-you are costumes on top. I am not sure I believe it anymore. The trolley study does not help that belief.
The language and how we master it changes us for real. You grow a smaller or larger personality, sometimes a colder one. The context does not hide a self. It decides how much self there is room for.
Which of your selves did you pick, and which one picked you?