How is it that we learn?
Is it through the small inflections of conversations that carry us through an interaction? In how we observe and react to one another? Is it in the feeling of someone starting to see you, again and again, until that familiarity begins to feel grounding?
How do we feel rooted in a space, a routine, a rhythm that we are an outsider to? Maybe it’s from the familiarity that grows in the eyes of those you start to pass by daily. The kinship that unfolds through repetition, proximity, and time.
Maybe it starts with a guide. Like the past fellow at my organization, who handed down her lived experience to me in long voice memos as if it were a kind of gentle inheritance. What to watch out for, who to lean on, how to set boundaries early so that I don’t unravel later, suggestions carved from her own process of figuring it out. That kind of generational knowledge, shared casually, feels sacred, offered like a favor, like someone saying, “I want to help you through this.”
I found myself suddenly in meetings at the office. All at once, trying to stay engaged and understanding nothing. Scribbling my first Hindi words in the margins of my work notebook. Half-formed phrases and incorrect spellings. Confused not only because I didn’t understand the words, but because I often couldn’t even decipher which language I was hearing. Hindi? Gujarati? Both? Neither? My colleagues, the casual Indian polyglots, floating effortlessly through their own code-switching, while I grasp for even just the basics.
I’ve been here before. This discomfort is known to me. I lived in Buenos Aires two years ago, for six months, trying to catch the meaning of Spanish words in the air as I sat for late-night dinners and long sobremesas with my host mom who spoke the rapid Spanish of someone who didn’t know how to slow down. We talked— or rather tried to converse about philosophy, politics, religion, and relationships. Things far beyond my vocabulary. But I kept trying, fumbling, failing, and trying again. I arrived there with barely an “hola,” and left with an understanding of a whole new way of being. Because language is what connects us all. It’s how we come to understand what matters, the intimacies of culture, and relating to one another. It mediates all of our individual realities, it’s consciousness.
This double consciousness was something I was accustomed to since birth. Before I ever spoke English, the voices that surrounded me spoke Malayalam. It was the first language of my home, but slowly, through school and socializing, and survival, English began to take over. The language of belonging and of erasure. There’s a particular kind of diasporic ache in being fluent in the language that displaced your own. In being corrected, pitied, or joked about when trying to speak your “mother tongue.” A guest in a home you were supposed to be born into.
The language I came from was beautiful, but only when it became a spectacle, only as a tool for proving the authenticity of my Indian heritage, a heritage whose legitimacy is continuously scrutinized through regimes of racialized power.
So maybe part of this journey, of repeating the discomfort, is about reclaiming something. About remembering what it feels like to not understand and to be okay with that. Maybe it’s about learning how to live inside a contradiction. And unlearning the instinct to always make myself easier to understand.
I did it again when I travelled to France to study and gain fluency in the language. Another attempt to stitch myself into the fabric of a place using only sound and effort. This time with 4 years of high school language learning as my foundation. Four years of high school French that had given me a false sense of confidence. But I arrived and realized I knew nothing. Nothing of the pace of the language as it’s spoken by a native, or the way that some sounds become aspirated or overpronounced. But I’ve been through this process before. I know what it looks like for me, and I know how to help myself.
So I wonder — what does it say about me that I keep choosing this? Do I do it to prove something? To myself? To others? Do I chase the discomfort to avoid stillness, to keep my mind distracted, busy, and off deeper existential questions?
Maybe it’s a great curiosity.
And remembering that I chose this.
That it’s an immense privilege to be here, to fail, to learn, to listen, and to make mistakes.
The discomfort is an entry point, and the pattern starts to make more sense. Each time I place myself in a new environment I go through this same initial period of internal friction (albeit growing easier each time). I doubt myself. I question my reasons. I fixate on what I can’t say, on how much I don’t understand. But then, I stop needing everything to make sense immediately. The process of arriving, questioning, and learning, of course, is not just about language. It’s about what it means to let go of control and let yourself become in real time.
I think I’m drawn to this over and over because I want to grow by interrupting my habits of knowing. By being humbled enough to relearn the basics, to listen more than I speak, and to admit when I don’t get it. This is how I stay close to the edges of myself and make sure I never get too rigid in who I think I am.
Every time I say, “This is new for me,” instead of “I’m bad at this,” I give my brain permission to learn. And maybe even saying “I’m bad at this” can be powerful too, if it’s said with humility, not shame. Because growth starts with the honesty of, “I’m not good at this yet”, followed by, “but I’m going to try anyway”. Sometimes growth begins when we admit our weakness and choose to improve with intention, not comfort.
And then, slowly, or maybe all at once, you begin to connect. Acclimation sneaks up on you. You realize you’ve stopped translating in your head. You laugh at the right time. You catch the tone of the dialogue without even understanding the words. You understand a joke before someone explains it. And it feels like magic. So I remind myself, I don’t need the solutions right now. I’m not here to figure it all out today. If I was supposed to have all the answers, I wouldn’t be here for this long.
I want to be present.
Let it be unpolished, and messy, and true.
