From fractures to fashioning

Or, 'have I ceased to exist?'

A good friend asked me whether I felt I was fracturing myself in German. Whether, it was disingenuous to speak words in a foreign tongue whose meaning was highly similar, yet still different to your own. Whether I felt less like 'me', since she felt less like 'her'.

Jein. (Yes and no)

At first, yes, it is like fracturing. Or it feels like your splintering all over, though it's not purely the words and phrases themselves, that is, what they mean, which make you feel broken. Even the machinations and sounds of the words feel corrupting at first. (And by 'at first', I don't necessarily mean just at school. I mean that first taste of what it's really like to live in that language, breathe it, eat it, work in it, befriend in it, play in it, feel the rain in it. You don't really know what language does to your identity until you lose the ability to understand and be understood.)

We are present in our words. Our identity is conveyed and shared through them. So yes, when you stumble through the initial stages of real language learning, you are being pulled apart, piece by splintered piece. You're being humbled.

But anyone who has been living in a foreign language long enough will, I hope, also admit that there comes a point where you stop fracturing, at least for a while, and start fashioning.
Our identity is also mutually fashioned by words, by meaning, context, culture -they are the air we breath out as well as in. Only, we are unaware of the effect foreign words are having on our 'self' when we first enter the foreign stage.

I used to think I was creating a 'German' Vicky. A disingenuous alter-ego; a phoney.
Now, it's more like I am 'both', not 'either, or'. How I express who I am and who I think myself to be are inextricably linked to the language I am thinking in and speaking. And yes, there are the difficulties of translation where something is always lost. But there is also so much more to be gained as you learn more and more.

Identity is flexible because it is non-reductive. It is made of more than one facet, more than one colour or shape or tongue. Instead of resigning myself to frustration, my reaction rather should be to embrace the new facet and integrate it as far as is possible into my identity.

So, jein. There is a real fracturing. But there is also fashioning: expansion and inclusion. There is real creative power here, where instead of ceasing to exist, you exist differently. You exist as a flexible, fluxing 'both'. A constant growing process. Where, yes. There is sometimes a little pain involved.