Relocation: Choices and Reflections — Part 3
I think I finally understand why I wanted to leave.
- A Language I Hadn’t Used in Years
- Language Isn’t Just a Tool — It Creates a State of Mind
- It Doesn’t Disappear. It Just Becomes Hard to Reach.
- Three Languages, Three Different Versions of Me
- Why Spanish Feels Like Freedom
- You Don’t Have to Change Locations. Just Change Languages.
- What I Was Actually Looking For
- How I Want to Use This Going Forward
- Why I Wanted to Relocate
A Language I Hadn’t Used in Years
Yesterday, I spoke Spanish for the first time in a long while.
I hadn’t spoken Spanish in nearly seven years. I expected awkward silence and forgotten words. Instead, something familiar woke up almost immediately.
At first the words wouldn’t come. But after a few minutes of conversation, something loosened — and language started flowing in a way that surprised me.
It didn’t feel like remembering. It felt more like returning.
This isn’t unusual. The brain doesn’t simply erase languages you stop using. Dormant connections get reactivated by conversation, and what felt inaccessible starts coming back. The longer you spoke it in real life — not just studied it — the more readily it returns.
But alongside the language, something else came back too.
A version of myself that felt a little freer.
Language Isn’t Just a Tool — It Creates a State of Mind
We tend to think of languages as communication systems. But which language you’re speaking also shapes how you think, how openly you express emotion, even how much distance you keep from other people.
When I spoke Spanish, I didn’t worry about being precise. I said what I felt in the moment. If I didn’t want to discuss something, I deflected with a joke. If I did, I said it directly. That balance came naturally — almost automatically.
It Doesn’t Disappear. It Just Becomes Hard to Reach.
A language you’ve stopped using doesn’t vanish. It retreats. The knowledge stays encoded in memory; it just stops surfacing on its own. Conversation acts as a trigger — something that brings it back up to the surface.
And the more a language was part of your daily life rather than just your study routine, the more it’s stored as experience rather than information. It’s tied to emotions and situations and relationships, which is exactly why it comes back more readily.
There’s no such thing as starting over from zero with a language you once lived in.
Three Languages, Three Different Versions of Me
I grew up in a regional dialect. I learned standard Japanese later. I spent time in South America speaking Spanish.
Each of these languages carries a different kind of memory — and puts me in a different state.
When I hear the dialect I grew up with, something settles in me. A sense of ease I associate with childhood.
Standard Japanese is different. Somewhere in my body, speaking it still carries a faint tension — the memory of being corrected, of being told my pronunciation wasn’t right, of needing to get it right. Even now, standard Japanese comes with a subtle undercurrent of I need to present myself properly.
Spanish was nothing like that. When I was in South America, I was a foreigner — and foreigners aren’t expected to be perfect. The baseline assumption was: you don’t have to get it all right. Just get it across.
Inside that assumption, I was remarkably free.
Why Spanish Feels Like Freedom
The freedom I feel in Spanish isn’t really about the language itself. It’s about how I was treated when I used it.
Standard Japanese was the language I learned after being corrected again and again.
Spanish became the language of being accepted as I was.
That difference is still alive in my body. When I switch into Spanish, something in me steps back from the business of being assessed — and I remember what it feels like to just be myself.
You Don’t Have to Change Locations. Just Change Languages.
What struck me is that I don’t need to be in South America for this to work.
Even in Japan, speaking Spanish loosens something in my shoulders. And conversely, spending too long in standard Japanese only — I start unconsciously tightening, managing, editing myself without noticing.
In that sense, language is an environment.
Choosing which language to use is, to some degree, choosing who you get to be.
What I Was Actually Looking For
For a long time, my thinking has been oriented around where to live — around changing my environment, relocating, finding a better place.
But what I realized yesterday is that what I’ve been looking for isn’t a place.
It’s a state.
The state of: I don’t have to explain everything. I’m allowed to be a little unclear. I don’t have to perform.
Spanish gave me that feeling back. Not a new country. Just a different language.
How I Want to Use This Going Forward
So I don’t want to approach Spanish as study anymore.
I want to use it as a way back to myself — a kind of switch I can flip when I need to loosen up, step outside the performance, remember who I am without the pressure.
It doesn’t have to be much. It doesn’t have to be perfect.
If it can get me back to that version of myself, that’s enough.
Why I Wanted to Relocate
Coming to this realization, something shifted in how I see the whole question of moving.
I’d been telling myself: if I change where I live, things will get easier.
But maybe what I was really after wasn’t a place. It was the feeling I had in that place — a particular way of being in the world that I’d lost touch with.
If that’s true, then relocation is one possible path to that feeling. Not the destination itself.
That thought changes the calculation, at least a little.
Maybe what I wanted wasn’t a new place after all. Maybe I simply wanted to feel like myself again.
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