Punch drunk and "Crazy People"

March 2014

When they heard about our language immersion plans, several friends of Kat and I warned us, "Your brain is going to hurt all the time. You will be exhausted. Then it'll just click." Well, we're still waiting for the click, but we experienced the brain-ache and exhaustion right away, and it wasn't how I expected.

The Friday night after my first week of working in an all-Spanish environment, I felt drunk. Not dizzy, but thick and slow, or very, very tired without being sleepy. All my reaction times were slow, my words came slowly-- I'm pretty sure I was even blinking slowly.

That was me. It still is.

Partly it was exhaustion from listening so carefully all day, and from having to think so hard to understand anything at all. I've done my share of traveling to places that don't speak English, but I've never lived somewhere for the express purpose of learning the language. In the US I usually just know what people are saying without thinking about it, and I have completely taken that for granted.

For years I have taken the liberty of giving myself global awareness cred. I am comfortable working in an environment where I hear Somali and Spanish spoken frequently every day– yay me! Pfft. I realize now that was hubris. Not understanding a few passing conversations is totally different than not understanding the street signs, the billboards, the TV, the language of commerce. My boss. The pharmacist. Any given voice on the phone. Not speaking the language where you live is exhausting. I don't know how I will act on this hard-won knowledge, but I already have about 500% more empathy for English language learners in the US.

I said before that I didn't feel sleepy, but have I mentioned the sleeping? Man. Both Kat and I need a lot more sleep than usual, and if we attempt to get by on our normal amount, one of us will lay back to "relax" at 8:30 p.m. only to wake up 11 hours later. I would like to think it's the adult brain version of when kids have growth spurts and sleep a lot. Here's hoping our brains are making good use of the extra hours to build the blessed synapses of pre-fluency.

Even though living life in Spanish is eating up a lot of energy, my progress still feels frustratingly slow. I'm sure (?) I'm learning faster than it seems from the inside, but some days are still "hello" days. There's a movie called "Crazy People" about a collection of asylum inmates, and one of them is a guy who only ever says "hello." Entire sentences go, "Hello, hello hello hello hello, hello hello." And so on. The kids at my school come running up, hug my legs, and say...something... and sometimes the most I can manage is that.

"¡Hola!"