Relationship with my languages

Article in English 🇬🇧

It’s fascinating how languages live in us. My French, which had been my one and only for more than twenty years, took a step back over the past fourteen and survived in a corner of my life where I would solely speak, read and write it with family, and occasionally with a few friends and acquaintances. I would switch it on and off, on demand, as and when I needed it. But as time passed, I noticed it had stopped being so easy to do so; it had ceased to be one of my strengths. Its place had ceded room to English which had become my day to day language. I was living in it, surrounded by it and it had permeated my own head, my thinking and even made its way into my writing.

This transition took many years to root itself and at the same time never became a true replacement, nor was it intended to. The fact is, no matter how hard I tried, I could never stop noticing defects in the form of an imperfect pronunciation, a grammatical mistake, an inversion of words (‘screen fly’ being the ultimate winner). There were always little details creeping in inadvertently (annoyingly so) and giving away that this wasn’t the language I was born into. It was learned, borrowed, loved and cherished, but never truly mine. 

Meanwhile, my French, which I had somewhat left, had left me too. Of course it was there, in an impoverished and tarnished state. Just like any relationship you don’t attend to and nourish, it ends up fading away and disappearing. In other words, I didn’t really take care of my French, I had taken it for granted. I thought it will always be there for me, intact, loyal, immovable, as if it was a birthright. I felt entitled to it. That was foolish. 

Over the years, I found myself with the lingering frustration of living in a language that will forever escape me, just a touch, like a lover who will never fully love me back and, alongside, the reminiscence of an old lover who was wonderful but whose life had had its own way of sending us on different paths. 

And then, like a twist in the plot of a romantic screenplay that was already shaky, came what felt like a big betrayal, of a dream, an ideal, of a projected future in a country which I thought had become mine too. I faced a real question: am I going to betray myself for a relationship which isn’t what it had promised to be, or more precisely, what I thought it would be? The answer was “no”. That’s how my husband and I, on a day in March 2021, sat down in the living room and agreed that we were giving ourselves a year to pack up our lives and leave Australia. 

To all die hard Capricorns out there reading this or for those of you who are close to one, you know full well that we, little stubborn sea-goats, love with our everything, we are resilient, patient and tolerant up to the point where the line is crossed. The red zone comes suddenly, and often with little warning, on fire and then that’s it, we’re gone and there is (usually) no getting us back. And that, in a nutshell, is what happened. 

A year later, I left the relationship that I loved so much, that I poured so much into but that I also found indescribably difficult and which had betrayed me to such an extent and on so many levels that I chose to leave. 

I am sure you’re no stranger to the advice of not jumping from one relationship to the next. Well, when it comes to leaving a country, let’s be honest, you’re grateful your ex is willing to take you back and crash on the couch for a while. I am being silly but it turns out that I went back to France for a few months before we found our home in Portugal. 

Even when you’re French, even when it’s your roots, your culture of origin, your basecamp, a place you’ve often come back to visit, inwardly it’s complicated. Australia was freshly in our wake, I was like a sponge, full of what was going to be slowly squeezed out in order to let it go and what was coming out felt bloody painful. Not much had been processed yet; on one hand I was feeling freed, relieved, but also heartbroken and sad. I felt I had given it my best shot but it simply wasn’t the ‘happy ever after’ I had envisioned.

Side note here to clarify that I had received many hints (aka: red flags) about this in the past but had gladly overlooked all the signs which didn’t fit in my perfect projected reality of what I wanted to see and perceived. Side note closed. 

I didn’t come back to my first love, country wise, if that’s what you wonder. I had no intention of living in France though I love being closer to it and going back much more often. What’s beautiful though is that the language started to welcome me back, to pull me back. Through books, movies, podcasts, authors, thinkers, etc. Not purposefully I believe, a space was being created again for this primary language of mine which I still wasn’t living in, still wasn’t speaking at home but that the geographical closeness had somehow revived. As if the French language was telling me: ‘I know you still love me, and I still love you, and we are okay’. Little by little, that’s how I found myself diving back into some vocabulary that I thought was far gone, giving me the momentum to one day write an article here, in French and then later deciding to alternate between French and English. As of today, I have more therapy work in French than in English which seems just unreal and which two years ago was unthinkable. 

In that language resurrection, I have also added a new one which I am currently learning: Portuguese. It’s actually grammatically very close to French which helps me immensely. What’s noticeable however is that I have started to struggle at times with my English. I make mistakes I wasn’t making before, I forget words just the way I used to forget some in French.

If I wanted to push the metaphor, I’d say that I feel like I have two lovers to maintain a relationship with. Sometimes I feel I should choose and really commit to just one. From experience, I just don’t think it works this way with languages, especially for writers. What I have learned though is that as far as languages are concerned, you get what you put in. So I am doing my best to pour love in both whilst trying to learn how Portuguese wants to be loved. 

Thank you for reading.
Mahé