I’m about to turn forty-four, and until fairly recently, I was tired, properly tired, of explaining myself. Not all explaining, to be fair. When someone asks you to justify an actual decision, moving, leaving a job, staying single, fine, I understand the question, even if I don’t always love it. What I never understood was explaining myself for things that weren’t decisions at all. Misunderstandings. Accidents of language. Why do that? Why hand someone a defence for something you didn’t even do on purpose?
Ten years into living in a different country, and I still haven’t managed to think in English. I think in Greek, translate on the fly, and speak whatever comes out the other end. It’s a strange, invisible kind of labour that nobody else in the room is doing, running a constant background process just to sound like I belong in the conversation I’m already having. Most of the time it’s fine, seamless even, nobody notices the machinery. Occasionally, though, it produces a sentence that means something entirely different to the one in my head, and I’ve spent an embarassing amount of energy over the years clarifying, backtracking, explaining the explanation, all for a misfire that was never really mine to apologise for in the first place.
A Greek expression translated word for word into English can land somewhere between confusing and mildly alarming, and I’ve watched a perfectly normal sentence in my head arrive in someone else’s ears sounding like a threat, or a proposal, or both. There’s a particular kind of silence that follows one of these, a small pause where you can see the other person recalibrating, deciding whether to ask you to repeat that or just quietly move the conversation along. For years, I filled that silence every single time, eager to smooth it over, to prove I wasn’t as odd as the sentence suggested.
A couple years of therapy fixed that particular habit rather efficiently. I stopped caring, in the useful sense, whether people occasionally misunderstood me. It’s not my job to pre-translate myself into a version that requires no effort from someone else, polished smooth enough that nobody ever has to pause and ask a single clarifying question. Some friction is fine. Most of it isn’t actually mine to carry.
Which brings me to a customer, some years back, unmistakably posh, who informed me she “genuinely could not understand a word” I was saying, on account of my accent. Delivered with the specific tone of someone who considered this my failing rather than a simple fact of geography. I asked her, politely, how many languages she spoke. She understood that sentence perfectly well, ordered her drink, and went and sat back down at her table. Funny, that. Turns out the accent was never really the problem.
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