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!