Half myself in English

I feel most like an impostor when I have to exist in an environment where I must speak English for a prolonged period. I feel a part of me is paused, a fraction of myself almost unable to breathe or fully exist in the Anglosphere.

I know I’m not the only person to experience this. I know it probably happens to most people who speak a language different from their own for too long. You feel possessed by a liar—this other persona who does not entirely act, think, react, fight, joke, or coexist the way you normally do in your native tongue.

I also know there is science that explains this phenomenon. I have vaguely read about it, but I’m not interested in facts right now. All I want to do is express how I feel to convince myself that the English-speaking Benjamín—whose pronunciation in Spanish no one gets unless I say BEN-juh-min—is not a liar, but a part-time worker who needs to survive and adapt to a different world when needed.

Although I have never stayed longer than a month on a single visit to an Anglophone country, a good percentage of my friends are native English speakers or speak other languages, and we communicate in English because it’s the language we share in common. Several of them are not only my friends but extremely close ones. I’m sure they know me well, but I’m not entirely sure they know me properly—a concept I detest.

A big part of my innate personality focuses on immediate humor and its use in every possible instance. In the Spanish-speaking universe, I’m known for it—at least in close circles made up of people who truly know me or have spent a lot of time in my presence. I am usually a witty, ingenious clown, and the most sarcastic person in the group. Humor is the lens through which I have chosen to see life, a tool I use to push myself forward despite hardships.

A big part of my relationships with my Hispanic relatives and friends revolves around humor, with me almost always at center stage. To a great extent, the way I relate to them is through loving, friendly bullying and constantly taking the piss out of each other.

If you asked my Spanish-speaking close ones to describe me in three words, “funny” and “sarcastic” would be two out of three—“horny” would probably be the third. I doubt my English-speaking friends would answer with the first two if asked the same question.

There is even a very exaggerated humorous physicality that gets unconsciously switched off when I’m speaking English. I kind of feel a little trapped in a four-yard shirt, as if my body were being held still by this foreign language and could not move naturally.

Needless to say, all these imaginary or very real restraints I experience while speaking English also make me feel dumb. Of course, I’m thinking people assume I can’t articulate my thoughts properly and, above all, that I lack personality. It is frustrating. I might be overreacting, of course, like I often do. But I want to grant myself the benefit of the doubt on this one.

I feel sad knowing that my good friends who speak English will probably never get to know me fully. And it’s not even a matter of being good at English—because I am. I think there’s something else I haven’t yet learned how to unlock, a level of Anglophone existence I haven’t attained, that keeps me from being 100% myself.

The desperation gets to a point where my head hurts and my mood changes. Sometimes I am down in English, even under excellent circumstances, and one of the only logical explanations I have found for this is that I feel the burden of not having been fully myself.

It might affect me more than normal because the ability to express myself is vital to my well-being. If I don’t get to fully explain myself or even tell a joke as wittily as I imagine it or as quickly, my obsessive, controlling, sometimes toxic brain takes it as a minor failure. As I understand I need to reframe this, I also look back at the years when I learned English, searching for more answers.

My high school was bilingual. I took all my subjects in English except for math, religion, civics, and, of course, Spanish. History, science, accounting, advertising, marketing—everything else was in English. And then, of course, there were the actual English-related subjects: speech, literature, and not just English, but “business English.”

At the school my parents chose for me, you could sort of specialize in specific fields like science, marketing and advertising, accounting, tourism, or literature from age fourteen. I chose marketing and advertising. That’s the reason why I was already learning university-level marketing concepts in high school. It was also the reason why most of the English I learned was meant to be used at a professional level: “business English.”

They taught us their version of formal English. I still have some of the books, which, by the way, I consider really good. Everything was about preparing us to face the Anglosphere as professionals, not so much as individuals. So, yeah, maybe that whole business English thing did something to my brain.

My school was also Methodist and extremely strict. We wore a uniform that our supervisors demanded remain intact at all times. There were restrictions for anything imaginable. And some professors were so rigid that if they heard you speaking Spanish in the halls, they would tell you off in the less extreme cases; in the most extreme, they would lower your grades—especially if you said “buenos días” instead of “good morning” in class.

After I finished high school, I immediately went into “business English” mode. My first job was as a customer service representative for Continental Airlines, now United Airlines. I applied all my English knowledge in a role that demanded formality, professionalism, and a rigid set of procedures outlined in a very specific rule book.

The position required me to learn entirely new software, aviation lingo, international abbreviations for countries, cities, and airports, U.S. and Panamanian law, international law, countless customer service courses that were constantly updated, and a million other things in English. I was on probation for three months and sent to Houston, Texas, for two weeks to complete my training, where I had to pass three exams with a score above 90. Otherwise, I would be immediately fired, as happened to some of my coworkers on that trip.

I had that job for three years, and it wasn’t until I moved on—and my life was hit by some wild curveballs—that I met the group of English-speaking friends I’ve mentioned in this note. I started partying with them, taking trips to places in my country I had never visited before, watching movies together, and spending countless days in their company. That was really when I began using a different kind of English, I reckon—a more social version of everything I had practiced before.

I’d say school also tried to prepare me for these kinds of interactions, but until then my mindset had probably been fixed on using my second language as a tool to break into the business world.

I met my Anglophone friends around 2013. Twelve years have passed since then. So, in a way, I could say I’m barely an adolescent in real, conversational, social English. Maybe when I’m 45, the adult version of myself in English will finally blossom—hopefully.

The truth is that, whether for all these reasons, others I’m unconsciously overlooking, or whatever science has to say about the matter, I guess I do feel the need to be more formal or correct in English. As if my goal with Shakespeare’s language had never been to be myself, but simply to be competent in the adult world.

I am already competent in the Anglosphere’s professional universe. So, now that I’ve achieved that, you would think my brain could relax and allow me to shift objectives. I’ve tried, but a part of my mind is still resisting the switch from professional survival to fulfillment of expression, and to be one in English as much as I am one in Spanish—to show myself wholly instead of partially to a group of friends who deserve me completely.

I sometimes feel like someone hiding a secret, except the secret is a part of my personality. Curiously enough, this mental language barrier doesn’t seem to affect my attitude or character. I can be kind or bitchy in both languages (actually, no. I’m like ten times kinder in English, which I know is also somehow psychologically tied to everything I’ve explained here), just as much as I can be strong-minded whenever I need to be.

My main issue is humor. My mind finds herself needing to choose between survival English and personality English, and has made up her mind about it, apparently. For now. I’m on a mission to change that and lean more toward the latter.

Regardless, I do wonder if I will ever feel 100% Benjamín Lemuel Cedeño Bonilla in English. The day will come, I assume. Anyway, I now feel the need to throw myself at Italian.

Imagine… my poor, crazy brain will go into a full-blown short circuit. Will it be able to handle it? It better, because I’ll give it no alternative.

My poor, poor brain.