Learning Spanish has been far more emotional than I expected. Not in a dramatic way — but in a quiet, reflective one. It’s forced me to look at my expectations, my confidence, and the stories I’ve carried with me for decades about what it means to be “good” at something.
My Spanish has improved leaps and bounds since I started classes. No, it’s not where I thought it would be — but in hindsight, that expectation was wildly unrealistic. It was built on other people’s stories. Other people who, notably, had never tried to learn a foreign language as an adult.
“Oh, my sister spent six weeks in Costa Rica and came back fluent.”
Did she really, Karen?
Good for her.
I’ve had to adjust my definition of fluency — and remind myself daily that I didn’t learn English in eight weeks either. So yes: can I understand about 90% of most conversations? Absolutely. Is my brain very good at filling in the blanks and making educated guesses about the other 10%? You bet. If I took a written Spanish exam, would my level be considered advanced? According to my teacher, yes.
Her words: “You have the capacity. You understand all the concepts. Now you need to find the confidence to speak without fear.”
You’re a funny one, Carmen.
But… she’s not wrong.
I stop myself from speaking far more than I’d like to admit, and I’ve been asking myself why. Sure, I don’t want to sound like an idiot — but there’s more to it than that.
First: when I studied Spanish in highschool, I was actually excited about it. But no one else was. Wanting to learn another language wasn’t cool. And high school is brutal. The last thing I wanted was to raise my hand and butcher a sentence in front of people who were waiting to laugh.
So, without realizing it, I made a quiet rule for myself: don’t speak unless you can say it perfectly.
Fast-forward twenty years, and — shockingly — that rule is not serving me.
The second realization came from conversations with other women at school. As women, many of us were raised (often unintentionally, but very clearly) to make ourselves small. To not take up too much space. To not waste anyone’s time.
Learning a language requires the exact opposite.
You have to put yourself out there.
You have to take up space in conversations.
You have to speak slowly, awkwardly, imperfectly.
And you have to completely reframe what “wasting someone’s time” even means.
I’ve sat at the dinner table with my host family and stayed quiet — not because I had nothing to say, but because I knew it would take me a while to say it. I didn’t want to impose. Meanwhile, they showed me — over and over — that the opposite was true. They encouraged me to speak. They waited while I finished my sentences. They corrected me gently and kept the conversation going.
I was talking to a few women at school one day about a new student who had joined my homestay. A man — slightly younger than me — whose Spanish, on paper, was far more basic than mine.
And yet.
That did not stop him from confidently taking what felt like five full business minutes to say one very simple sentence.
I wish I were exaggerating.
Every time he opened his mouth, I could feel my soul briefly leave my body. I’d sit there thinking, sir… this sentence has a beginning, a middle, and an end — please choose one and land the plane.
It wasn’t that he was wrong. Everyone is wrong when they’re learning. It was that he was so profoundly unbothered by it.
No apologies.
No nervous laughter.
No “sorry, sorry, my Spanish is terrible” preamble.
He took up space. He took up time. He said things incorrectly and then… simply continued on with his life.
And after a few days — once my secondhand embarrassment wore off — I realized something deeply inconvenient.
I didn’t actually cringe because he was struggling.
I cringed because he wasn’t afraid to struggle out loud.
And somewhere between watching him butcher verb conjugations with unwavering confidence and calmly wait for people to catch up to him, I felt something unexpected creep in.
Envy.
That’s when one of the women chirped in:
“Oh to have the confidence of a mediocre man.”
And honestly? She nailed it.
Mediocre men speak before they’re ready.
They speak without checking if they’re correct.
They speak without apologizing for taking up space.
They speak with confidence that far exceeds their actual level of expertise — and somehow, the world just… lets them.
Imagine approaching Spanish with that energy.
No pre-apology.
No self-editing mid-sentence.
No shrinking.
Just speaking — wrong verb tense and all — trusting that you’ll be understood or corrected, and that neither outcome is fatal.
What this experience has reminded me — again — is how often our past quietly shapes our present without our permission. I’ve learned this truth over and over in different chapters of my life. Patterns I didn’t even know existed didn’t reveal themselves until I was forced into a situation where I couldn’t rely on my usual crutches. Only then did I recognize how old experiences — classrooms, authority figures, social expectations, moments of embarrassment I thought I’d long forgotten — were still running the show.
Unlearning old beliefs has been a recurring theme in this journey. Some of them are big and obvious. Others, like this one, feel almost small — a hesitation to speak, a need to be perfect before opening my mouth, a fear of taking up someone else’s time. But small doesn’t mean insignificant. If anything, it’s a reminder that I still have work to do. Not in a discouraging way — but in the honest, ongoing way that real growth tends to show up.
-A
One Life One Encounter 
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