If you’ve been keeping up (or have ever seen a Pixar movie
with me) you know everything makes me cry. It’s not hard. I’m one of the few
people still affected by violence, hardship and the cruelties of life, as well
as the beauty, happiness and solace we find in it, too. If emotions were on a
scale from 1-10 (1 being utter depression and 10 being sheer bliss), I’m
generally crying from 1-3 and 7-10. Plus, I’m of the belief that crying is ok.
It’s cathartic. I hate to cry in front of people, but if I must, then I must.
People of the world, stop trying to make me stop crying. I’m not defective, I’m
merely releasing pent up emotion in the only way possible.
So—I cry when I’m happy and sad, but I also cry when I am
absolutely frustrated. And this is where this entry gains its relevance. If
that square peg won’t fit in the round hole, I am up to my ears in tears.
Tuesday morning (at the ripe hour of 8am) I have my course
with Argentines. Today was Tuesday and I was already frustrated because the
colectivo took sooooo much time, thereby making me late despite the fact that I
left reasonably early. While lateness is a given in Argentine culture, it’s
forbidden in school, so I slinked to a seat in shame, upset by the fact that
I’d missed 20 minutes of content and didn’t really know what was going on.
By the time I gained my bearings, our professor left for
some breakfast she was attending, and our “substitute professor” entered and
admitted that he was terrible at being sympathetic to foreign students so he
would continue with his normal mode of speech which was indistinguishable and
filled with words I was unfamiliar with. Ok, I can handle that, and I’m trying
to accustom myself to the normal mode of speech here, which is just this, so
I’ll pick up what I can. We continued with our review of the provinces, cities
and activities in Argentina. We started going through Buenos Aires (Capital
Federal) and the professor seemed to be amused by making me search hopelessly
on a city map for intersections whose locations I didn’t know. Then students
would make commentary and I know they weren’t making fun of me, but I had NO
IDEA what they were saying because in addition to not being able to hear them
at all, none of their words were distinguishable. A textual representation of
how most people speak here would be this: “Síesunquilomboacá???(words I don’t know)???¿todobienno? Yeah,
cause that’s not confusing. I enunciate everything and speak loudly, so anyone
that mumbles and speaks quietly effectively renders me deaf—especially when
they’re speaking Spanish, in which case I’m rendered deaf AND dumb.
The professor could see that I was getting confused so he
would repeat himself in English. But if there’s anything I hate more than
people mumbling everything, it’s that. Oh you don’t understand me? Let me just
dumb it down for you in English. This
happens a lot in stores or on the street. People ask me something or vice versa
and then when they respond or I have to respond, I get confused because I can’t
hear them very well due to background noise or the fact that they speak softly,
a million miles an hour. But instead of speaking up or slowing down a little,
they just say “oh you don’t speak Spanish, then?” I DON’T SPEAK SPANISH WHEN I
CAN’T FREAKING HEAR WHAT WORDS YOU’RE SAYING. And then I get pissed off and
feel stupid. I know it’s a little presumptuous to expect people to change their
manner of speech for little foreign me, but at the same time, obviously I’m not
from Argentina, so why do they act so taken aback? If somebody with okay-ish
English was giving me the “uh oh I don’t understand you” face, I’d slow down
and use different vocab, because even though their goal is fluency, you can’t
be fluent if everything is flying over your head.
So with 20 minutes left in class, I could feel the tears
coming on because I was starting to doubt my ability to be in this class
because in addition to hardly knowing any details about Argentina’s provinces,
I can’t understand any of the students, as nice as they are. Then that
transgressed into me doubting my ability to leave this country with a solid
grasp of Spanish. While I have already improved tremendously, it’s still
difficult to understand movies without subtitles and it takes me at least 3
minutes to get accustomed to someone’s manner of speaking. And I would feel
like I failed if I left here still having to think about conjugating verbs and making
sure that there was concordance between masculine and feminine nouns and
adjectives. I left class thinking: “what if I never get to the point where I
can understand the students or the professor?”. Because to me, that translates
as somewhat of a failure being that I’ll be here for 6 months total.
I tried to hold it together by telling myself it hasn’t been
even 2 months yet, so I still have a lot of time and everybody improves so much
when they study abroad. But at the same time, I’ve had students in my Spanish
classes that had studied abroad before and they still sucked as much as I did. So
how do I know for sure that I’ll really “get it”? Everybody makes it sound like
this effortless, magical transition, and all you have to do is live abroad and
you’ll magically be fluent, but that’s not how it happens. It’s hard and it
doesn’t happen overnight. You get overwhelmed, you make mistakes, you don’t
understand and your confidence gets shaken. This has never stopped me from
trying to speak, because generally I succeed in communicating, but for this stupid
class, I’d had enough.
I trudged to the ISA office, trying to hold back tears,
wanting to cry more for feeling embarrassed about crying in the street.
Everything takes effort in life, and I can handle this when it’s an effort that
I’m in control of, like a project or something creative—but when it’s an effort
out of my hands, like when I’m learning a new skill and I suck at it, I get so
incredibly frustrated. I just wanna do it now and do it right. It’s a flaw, I
know, to not be able to accept failure or inability to do something—some people
are more inspired by their failure and at times, I am too. But usually I get
upset with myself if I really can’t do it well and then I assume that I’m just
a failure overall. Dramatic, yes, I know, I know, but as a person who generally
succeeds and does things well 90% of the time, that 10% where I just fail is
hard for me to take. I’m learning to handle it better, but for now, let me cry
in the corner.
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