Fluent English Trifles or My strange relationship with English
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Hi my dear beloved customers,
What can I get you today? What about our Weekly Special Fluent English Trifles?
A few days ago, two of my beloved regulars asked me how I had learned to speak english so fluently and I thought it would be interesting to share with you all the strong and strange relationship I have with English language since a very young age.
As far as I can remember, English was always an attractive language to me - For those who don’t know me yet, I am French. It began when I was little, I specifically very vividly remember a moment at my grand-parents’ home where I was staying for my summer vacations, I must have been seven or eight at the time, and I was in the kitchen pretending reading an article in my grandpa’s newspaper with an english accent. This memory is very anecdotic but yet, it stayed stuck in my head with lively details and my beloved grand-father’s kind patient smile.
Nowadays, in France, kids have access to English at school starting kindergarten and can learn it gradually and playfully with video for children on Youtube or even specific programs on Disney Junior but, in my antique times, I could only access English through songs on the radio. As I was a singing kid, just as my daughter after me, I use to sing from the bottom of my heart in a very phonetic English. It may be that relationship with music that started it all though I think it might be coming from much further than that…
Of course, things got serious with English, when I entered Junior High and started to learn English at school. It was mid 80’s, the beginning of free independant FM radios in France broadcasting pop music from all over the world, mainly Great-Britain and the US, and the emergence of music videos on TV.
I turned out to be quite gifted with foreign languages and began to translate the songs I loved to understand their meanings - as you can see with my Life, the Universe and Everything playlist, I haven’t really changed in that matter -, with my english dictionnary as my best aid, its digital version is still my best companion up until now.
And, of course, as a teenager, I began to dream, to fantasize my future life… Some people dream to be famous artists, astronauts, doctors, I dreamt of being loved. It was quite tough at home with my abusive demeaning mother and a newly born brother who was shaking up the life of the self-centered only child I used to be on top of all the changes due to becoming a teenager. As most teen girls, I was a groupie, a Duran Duran one, and dreamt of being swept away from my tedious life to live a glamourous one in the arms of a handsome rockstar. I dreamt of becoming the chosen one, the special one, the one selected among all the others for I felt so meaningless at home, alone and abandonned - I was a bit of a drama queen too.
I have always been a practical person so I knew that, if I wanted to have a teeny weeny chance to marry my rockstar, we need to, at least, share the same language, so, at the age of fifteen, I mastered English! Indeed, at the end of Junior High, my mother, who had a high respect for education and knowledge - and I thank her for that -, sent me for one month to live with an american family in Colorado. A month later, I came back fluent in English. It had help creating the switch in my head that allows me to think - and even dream - in English. I was a little upset I had not met the boy of my dreams during my stay but I was still on my way to become a rockstar’s wife and meet that music prince in a shiny armor who would rescue me from my evil queen mother…
What is very funny with foreign languages is that words don’t taste the same in your mouth as their conterparts in your mother tongue. It is very true for bad words, they have a density in your own language, because they are attached to your education and the relationship you had with them during your whole life, the transgression you experience with them when you’re a teenager; they just don’t have that emotional heaviness in another language, they are just some ordinary words you know it is best not to use but there are no emotions, no memories attached to them. I remember the mother of the family I lived in in Colorado using “Fudge” instead of the F-word and “Shoot” for the other one - we have the same kind of “arrangement” in French - and I loved it and kept it with me for I thought it was cute. “Cute” was also a word I learned there and I loved how it sounded, I thought the sound of it related exactly to its meaning.
As the meaning of words change in a foreign language, somehow, you are not exactly the same person when you speak it, at least I am not and was definitely not at that time. I didn’t know who I was in my early teenage years - and was not really better at it towards their end either - but what I knew for sure is that I didn’t fit: I didn’t fit at home where I had the feeling I was never who I was supposed to be and never doing things the way I was supposed to, I didn’t fit at school where I was bored most of the time except in my French and English classes… But when I spoke English, being good at it in the process, I could be who I really was, the person I was longing to be, who could, at least, achieve one thing in her life, and not be the failure I saw in my mother’s scornful eyes. Somehow, at that point in my life, English became my soul language.
I have no regrets because my path needed to be the way it is to help me understand the lessons that were part of my learning mission in this life, but, to be happy in my early adult life, I should have left and go living in an english speaking country, far from my abusive mother but I couldn’t drive - something I have in common with Quincy Jones, which makes me proud of it rather than bitter! - and was too scared to go so far on my own since my mother had raised me in a co-dependant relationship with a very scary view of the outside world. I had to wait until my 35th birthday to be able to put more than 600 miles (1 000 km) between me and her - when I told her I was leaving she told me that my husband-to-be would regret it, and thus dump me, when he would realize how expensive a woman I was; at that point, and for the next two years, I would earn more money than my husband so my mother must have mistaken me with herself…
Back to English, after a degree in English Litterature and Civilization in College, I forgot all about my distant foreign dreams to enter the 9/7 working world in banking and insurances and left English, and my true self, behind for two decades. I still practiced it through movies, TV shows and books, but it became a hobby, such as music or painting can be, but didn’t belong to my everyday life anymore. It is strange to say it but I think, somehow, even years after my first breakdown, my whole true self had become a hobby as well, only practiced at home for a few hours on week-ends, not inhabiting my “normal” life.
English came back in my life a decade before writing when I started my business with music artists and festivals with my husband. As he doesn’t speak English, I was the one handling anglophone artists and managements. I so much enjoyed myself when I got the chance to chit-chat with English-speaking people in festivals that I missed it tremendously the rest of the year, waiting eagerly for the next festival edition and the few days of English speaking ahead.
Then, after my burn-out, when I was starting to seek for new kinds of truth for my life, the written and video material that was helpful to me in that matter was essentially available in English, mainly because spirituality and self-development techniques are much more well accepted in the US than in France where they are, at best, frowned upon and, at worst, considered just plain crap.
Moreover, as I was awakening to myself again, I wanted to use the gifts I had been given, such as my skills in English, and writing came right afterwards for it took me time to remember how much I enjoyed it as well. Last November, when 11/11 portal was opening - I don’t know if it’s real but my daughter, since a very early age, always told me that eleven was a strong number and it can’t hurt to ask once a year for what you are wanting more in your life - I made a list of what I wanted to experience more for the year to come, quite a long list as a matter of fact, and one of the item was speaking English more. A few months later, I got to “write” in English on Substack almost everyday so I guess manifestation has worked its way though I would really like to speak more as well but I know that time will come too. All in due time, my guides would say.
During the past two years now, I’ve built my spiritual world and inner universe mainly in English: I talk to my guides in English, I pray in English, I usually talk to the Universe in English… Because it is the language of my soul as well as the language of my spiritual teachers such as Neale Donald Walsch, Justin Michael Williams, Lee Harris and so many more, and it has become the language of my community on Substack.
All this already makes sense when you look at how emotionally English invited itself in my life but I sometimes wonder if I haven’t been an English speaking person in a past life, probably in the US at the end of the 19th century. Who knows?… Or maybe I have just watched too many episodes of “Little House on the Prairie”!
So tell me, my dear beloved customers, is there a foreign language or culture which attracts you in an unexpected way as much as English does for me?
Lots of love,
Geay
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Interesting story! I grew up in a Sicilian family and everyone spoke Italian, including me but I did know and learn English at an early age by watching TV and going to kindergarten! I have since lost my speaking Italian but I can still understand it!
What a great story! I love how our destiny is written into the very fiber of us. Life comes with trail markers! I’m glad you are finding and following them. I am sure much adventure awaits. Many blessings on the journey!