The Day English Broke My Heart

Brain Thoughts with Joselyn

Before I learned the English language, I was a reader.

Not in the casual, I enjoy a good book. I mean it in the way that some kids are obsessed with football or drawing or taking things apart to see how they work. Words were my thing. Reading and Grammar were my favorite subjects, and I was good at them in the way that felt effortless, the kind of good that makes you think this is just who I am. I loved how a few words strung together could create a story, a poem, a song so beautiful it could make a grown man cry. Stories took me places: ancient times, caves, castles, new discoveries. They brought me joy and sadness and everything in between. Words touched my life in a way that very little else could, except for music, which when combined with the right words created something that made me feel closer to God in a way I still cannot fully explain.

I went through a phase, probably around eight or nine, where I was convinced, there was no such thing as an unrhymable word. At home, I would sit under the fruit tree after school and test this theory, running through every word I knew, finding its match, proving to myself that language was a system with no loose ends. Everything connected. Everything had a pair.

I was so sure of this.

Then I Came to the United States

In Language Arts class, not long after I arrived, we were given an assignment to write a poem. Simple enough. Except the teacher paused before sending us off and said, almost as an aside, to remember that the word orange was unrhymable.

I sat with that for a moment.

Unrhymable. A word that had no match. A loose end in the system I had spent years believing was airtight. It was not the biggest problem I had encountered since arriving in this country, not by a long stretch, but something about it felt like a door closing. Like the language I was being asked to learn had its own set of rules that did not answer to logic, and it was not going to apologize for that.

And then came the grammar.

In Spanish, the words in a sentence know where they belong. The structure makes sense to me in my body, not just my brain. But English sentences, I discovered, only make sense if the words are arranged in an order that felt completely backwards to everything I knew. To translate anything, I had to first unorganize my thoughts. I had to take apart the way I naturally understood the world and rebuild it in a sequence that felt foreign and counterintuitive, and I had to do it fast enough to keep up with a classroom that had been doing this since birth.

I was outraged. I was confused. And I was deeply, genuinely grieving something I could not name yet.

That was the day grammar stopped being my favorite subject and left a hole in my life I did not know how to fill.

Sixteen Years Later, I Am Still Figuring It Out

After almost two decades in this country, there are still days I feel like an alien in costume trying to fit in. There are words in English my “stubborn” tongue refuses to pronounce, not because I cannot, but because some part of my brain looks at the spelling and the sound and says these two things do not belong together and I will not be participating. English and I have an understanding. We coexist. We work together. But we are not always at peace.

What I have learned, though, is that my love of language did not die in that Language Arts classroom. It just got complicated. And when things get complicated, I do what I have always done: I keep digging.

So I Went and I Digged

I study French now. Italian too. Not fluently, not yet, but consistently, the way you return to something because it feeds you even when it frustrates you. Some people might look at someone who already navigates two languages and ask why on earth you would voluntarily add more. But for me it makes complete sense. Every new language is a new room in a house I am still building. Every new word I learn in French or Italian expands something in me that English sometimes flattens.

Music has been the greatest teacher of all of them. There is something about a song that makes a language land differently, in your body before your brain, in your chest before your dictionary. I have learned more about the rhythm and feeling of a language through music than through any textbook. A French song can teach you how the language wants to be felt. An Italian aria can teach you where the breath lives in the words. Music does not care if your dialect is imperfect or if your tongue is “stubborn”. It meets you where you are.

And poetry, when I come back to it, always brings me home. Not to the US, and not to a classroom, but to my mother tongue. To Spanish. To the language that was there before any of this, the one that lives in my chest without effort, the one I do not have to think about because it just is. Poetry in Spanish reminds me of who I was before I had to translate myself for the world. It’s my name, Joselyn, the way my family pronounced it for over a decade – with an accent and flair. It reminds me that underneath all the adaptation and the overcompensation and the studying, there is a little girl under a fruit tree who was convinced every word had a match.

She was not wrong, by the way. She was just working in the wrong language.