A Different Language

Every word that I speak feels foreign to me. Almost unnatural. Even as I speak, I second-guess all of it, wondering if I have articulated what I said properly. I have been told countless times how good of a listener I am, but I almost never say that it's probably because I never know what to say. Or, maybe it was really that I never knew how to say it. When I do decide to open my mouth and respond, every possible question runs through my mind. Did I say the right thing? Should I have been more gentle? Did they no longer like me because of what I said? Yet, I thrive being around people. For so long, I feared being alone more than I cared to admit, but the times when I am alone, makes me appreciate when I am with others. It is just that I have never been able to say, in my voice, how hard it actually is for me to communicate in a way that everyone else seems to do so effortlessly.

As a little girl, I did what many other kids did. I immersed myself in fantasy worlds that seemed to come alive off of the pages and materialize around me. When I was around 7 or 8, I was staying at an aunt's house and I had finished the book that I brought with me, so I asked her what I could read. She pointed me toward the bookshelf, which didn't contain a single book that anyone would recommend a child to read, but one stood out to me: The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. As I read it, I never entirely comprehended what the book meant, but I just enjoyed reading about a world that existed outside of the one I lived every day. When I was bored in church, even as the drums in the Baptist church and people shouting flooded my ears, I read the Bible from the start of Genesis and I found it fascinating. Not because I could grasp religion at that point, but because it was my mind could visualize every word on the page.

I was so quiet as a child that my family forgot I was in the room at times, but I was aware of almost every word said. "Stay in a child's place," was ingrained in me, so, of course I never responded to anything that was being said, even if I wanted to. When we went to family gatherings, I could tolerate it for an hour or two, before I begged my mom to take me home, or, at least, let me sit alone, in the car. They never understood why, just assumed I was being difficult, but that was never it. My mind moved at a pace that was hard to explain to people. I could finish hundreds of pages of reading in half of a day because that was what my mind needed and craved. My mom and my older sister were natural at the social scene. They fit right in, always knowing what to say to make people laugh or instantly like them. That was never me. No one my age was interested in the things that intrigued me at that point. While every child said they wanted to be the traditional doctor, lawyer, etc., I wanted to be a diplomat.

Then, I grew up and realized that diplomats had to know how to speak. As I moved from middle school to high school and my schedule became more packed, the amount of time that I had to bury myself in books that I enjoyed, in comparison to the ones required of me to read, shrunk. I no longer had the escape of entire worlds created on paper and the necessity for me to actually have the company of others became so much more of a reality. They told me I was shy and quiet, but it was not because I had nothing to say. It was because they probably would not understand me when I did talk. Not because they were ignorant to the subjects that I wanted to talk about, but because my mind moved so much faster than my mouth did and there came a disconnect that made things so much more confusing for them.

When I had books, I was set. I could move from one to another and no one could tell me to slow down. When it came to having conversations with others, I had to learn the hard way that I was not going to be able to approach it by being myself because nothing has ever been able to hold my attention for as long as people can talk about one single thing. If someone begins to talk about what happened at their family dinner, I start thinking of times when my family did the same thing or what I am going to eat for dinner and, a few moments later, my mind is going to that question I forgot to Google earlier because I started doing something else as soon as I opened the webpage. This is not because I am bored or uninterested, it is simply the fact that I have never been able to slow my mind down and it is much easier to hide that when I am quiet, than it is when I am speaking.

My family jokes all the time that I get bored fast and they can never see me settling in one career, which is probably true. I want to do so much that the thought of only having to do one thing for the rest of my life is terrifying. My freshman year of college, I changed majors three times and, sophomore year, I went from pre-med to pre-law, a jump that makes people always look at me with a questioning look. I blamed it on my indecisiveness, but I realized that it was not my ability to choose. I knew what I wanted to choose, which was everything. Whether there is a conversation about politics or sports (Fly Eagles Fly) or the weather, I want to talk about all three at the same time because I draw connections so far-reached that it's kind of ridiculous, but that is still nothing compared to my mind, its organized chaos something I would never want to subject anyone to.

Even as I write this now, there are so many things that I want to say and sometimes I have a habit of going off on tangents that may make little sense. But, it has been my outlet. I am still in a place where, when I talk, I remain, arguably, overconscious of whether I make sense or if I'm speaking over the heads of the people I am talking to. However, the ability to write all of it down in what may be a jumbled mess or a 10-page research paper that earns an A, has granted me the capacity to find a voice that feels less foreign to me. There are still times when people look at me as though I'm speaking a different languages, but there are other times when we have conversations that last from sundown to sunrise, talking about absolutely anything and those are the moments that I value. They give me the escape that I had when I read books as a child and could imagine a world far beyond my own. My mind may never slow down to match my mouth, but maybe it can strike a balance.