Day: September 25, 2012

He Perdido Mis Palabras

/ lovizmytrio / Leave a comment

And do you know what I hate the most? I am a wordsmith. OK, maybe not the most amazing worker of words the world has ever seen, but I can say what I need to say, and what anyone else might be thinking as well, in a way that is genuine, that people can understand.

Do you know how difficult it is to go through each day and NOT be able to say what you want to say? To barely understand what those around you say in order to come up with an appropriate response? I am no longer witty. I am no longer audacious. I am just an ignorant fuck who sounds like a bumbling idiot.

If you were me, if you were the one whose parents and teachers told her at age eight, “You have a gift for words, you should be a writer,” do you know how difficult each waking moment would be? To know that your words were gone, stripped, tossed away? That your children’s words, the social butterfly oldest’s especially, the one who finds a friend in every circumstance, but has fear and anxiety now due to her language barrier, are all taken away??

And I ask myself, why am I here? Why have I demeaned myself to this extent that I will sit here crying for hours because my principal hates me so much that he told the department head that I deserved to be on my own, to travel to Murcia alone and figure out how to do my job because I have been so COLD to him???

I have met him twice, briefly, and I didn’t say much. I don’t talk much here. I am not myself. And now I am hated for not being myself, just like I am hated in other places for using my mouth too fucking much.

Why would I do this? Why would I turn down a viable job with a decent salary to become a teacher assistant in a foreign country where I CLEARLY don’t fit in, where the language burns my tongue, limits my every movement, where we are paupers with kids in a shitty school, where I have pulled myself ten notches down from my earned position in life?

The irony of it all: to learn a language. To find a new set of words, a new way of describing the world, to take on and imbed the words somewhere deep down, plant them in my soul for the hope of a different, better, view of this world.

Por favor. Ayúdame. He perdido mis palabras!

And It’s Not All Warm and Cozy

/ lovizmytrio / 2 Comments

I wish I could say to you in English how I feel, how you have made me feel. Smaller than an ant. Like an evil bitch. Speechless. ME. The mouthiest person you will never know, and I am now getting myself into trouble for NOT talking???

Please, let me give you a moment in my life. Just a tad. You go ahead and take your pretty little fanny onto a plane with your wife and three children, all who speak English much less than you, and start a job in an American school. You will probably meet twenty people on your first day. You will be introduced, shake hands, and not even be able to remember who is who, what department they work in, or what their names are. You will be surrounded by words you’ve never heard, gestures you’re unfamiliar with, and you will not know the appropriate response.

You will go home, walk the streets, perhaps one of your colleagues might see you, but you can’t remember who in the flurry of your first few days, when you have been traipsing across town filling out forms, trying to enroll your children in a decent school, and nodding transparently to everyone you meet whose words you cannot comprehend.

You might be just a little, um, COLD. Not because you are a cruel person, not because of the country you come from. Because YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.

And just like you don’t understand these words I type for you now, you certainly don’t understand me. You have already written me off like I’m dirt, without taking a moment to consider that every moment of my life for the past five months has been either gut-wrenching disappointment and fear or overwhelming confusion. Can you give me a break and consider how difficult this is for me? I am not a twenty-year-old college student whose parents are funding a fun time in Spain. I HAVE PUT MY ENTIRE LIFE ON THE LINE FOR YOU, FOR THIS “JOB,” AND YOU DON’T EVEN GIVE ME A SECOND THOUGHT.

But it’s OK. I’m the one who’s being cold, right?