For the past couple of days, I’ve been exchanging frequent messages with my college friends in Japan. I’m frankly astounded at how easy it has become to read in Japanese (at least when it comes to messages). I’m yet to take on the challenge of a full book, but gone are the days when I dreaded replying to an email because I simply didn’t know how to express myself and I wasn’t sure what was being said to me.
When I think about the progress I’ve made these past months, I can’t help feeling a twinge of sadness for my perfectionist past self, a person who shut herself behind a wall of I can’t. I have no idea how I made the friends that I made with my years-long refusal to speak in Japanese out loud. How did I even survive college?
(Don’t believe me? Straight from the horse’s mouth: I was engulfed in shame over my dwindling communication skills.)
In order to analyze this past self, to understand her and let her go with kindness, I must keep in mind that I used to approach languages from a place of shame. Shame that I couldn’t just magically speak a foreign language (a very difficult one, to be sure) at a native level.
If I had a time machine, I would talk to my past self and let her know that everything is alright, that no one is expecting anything from me other than sustained communication as a sign of friendship. However, part of me would also use the time machine to convince myself (by force, if necessary) that I need to get those languages in top shape NOW. That’s the perfectionist in me talking, the side of me that won’t admit that I’m a human being with struggles. So what if Japanese happens to be my struggle. It’s a very good struggle to have, if you think about it. A blessing, even.
What I hope is for my perfectionism not to take over at some point and decide that I’m not doing great at exchanging messages, thus shutting down the whole operation.
(And if it does? I’ll just sneak out behind its back and start over. And over. Again and again, start over. Start over so much that it stops looking like starting over and begins looking like a habit.)