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I don't know what's wrong with me lately but I've been refusing opportunities to speak my languages. They say twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern, right? About a month ago I was paired with a coworker from Spain. There was a quiet moment at a service point where this came out and it was a perfect chance to speak some Castilian, but I passed it up. Then of course iBAM, for which I'd been cramming Irish for weeks only to shy away from speaking it to the other Gaeilgeorí.
Yesterday, we had a prof talk about taking undergraduates to Hamburg to do original research. I ran into her at the refreshments table and in-between chatting about cheeses I mentioned studying abroad not too far from where she grew up. "Oh, so you must be fluent in German!" she said and it would've been so easy to respond with something like, "Würde gar nicht sagen, aber damals war das der Fall." But I didn't; I replied in English and that's all we spoke afterwards.
It would be easy to blame this reluctance on my worsening audio processing difficulties, which make me self-conscious even chatting in English in noisy environments. But there's more going on than just that. The observation from the Swiss woman made it clear that, at my age, I'm no longer expected to be learning languages, I'm expected to know them, and that adds a level of performance anxiety to my deep-seated needed to appear intelligent and interesting. And who needs that when I'm only really confident in my ability to charm when speaking my native tongue?
Yesterday, we had a prof talk about taking undergraduates to Hamburg to do original research. I ran into her at the refreshments table and in-between chatting about cheeses I mentioned studying abroad not too far from where she grew up. "Oh, so you must be fluent in German!" she said and it would've been so easy to respond with something like, "Würde gar nicht sagen, aber damals war das der Fall." But I didn't; I replied in English and that's all we spoke afterwards.
It would be easy to blame this reluctance on my worsening audio processing difficulties, which make me self-conscious even chatting in English in noisy environments. But there's more going on than just that. The observation from the Swiss woman made it clear that, at my age, I'm no longer expected to be learning languages, I'm expected to know them, and that adds a level of performance anxiety to my deep-seated needed to appear intelligent and interesting. And who needs that when I'm only really confident in my ability to charm when speaking my native tongue?
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