Dear Diary,

 

Lately I’ve been dealing with this weird feeling of an identity crisis. I have no idea how “spanish” I am??!?  I don’t really get it, I’ve been speaking spanish literally my entire life. Yet at work and soccer I feel so lost. My teammates speak a totally different language than I do and it’s so hard to keep up sometimes. I know I am fair skinned, but when people find out I’m Colombian they are always so surprised. I don’t know why, but they always ask me to prove it? “Speak spanish, can you say something in spanish for me?” As if I’m a dog speaking on command. My Hispanic teammates already know I am also latino. They don’t ask me if I can speak Spanish, they just start conversations with me. It feels nice, it’s welcoming, like a community I belong to. They are so friendly and inclusive with me, they tell me stories about their lives, jobs, party adventures, and even future goals. My teammates have built this unspoken chemistry on the field with me because of our similar playstyles. We emulate the same countries and players we’ve watched for our entire lives, South American soccer is a completely different playstyle than its European counterpart. They call out to me on the field in Spanish, they talk to me in warmups with slang I don’t understand; I feel like I just have to smile and pretend I do. Even though I mainly speak Spanish at home, I don’t have the confidence in myself to speak my language outside the comfort of my home. I don’t know why. I know what I want to say. I know how I want to say it, I have the vocabulary in order to properly display my feelings. But I always always always seem to respond in English whenever I’m spoken to outside of home. My friends don’t make fun of me for it, I have never felt out of place or felt the need to leave. It’s just weird. This feeling of shame? Disappointment in myself? I don’t know what to call it, but I always feel pretty embarrassed as a descendant from a Spanish speaking country. I wonder what my parents would say, I haven’t been able to bring up my concerns to them, they wouldn’t understand how I feel. They are both immigrants, English is their second language. They speak native Spanish as my peers do. Yet I can conversate with them and not anyone else. I don’t know where to pinpoint the disconnect in my confidence and my linguistic abilities. For example just last practice, Aidan and Elias were having a full blown conversation about their halloween plans in spanish. I knew exactly what their plans were, who was going, when, where. I wanted to interject and give my two cents and recommend other ideas to their already interesting plan.Yet nothing came out of my mouth. The two of them were looking at me while we were passing and warming up, they could tell that I had something I wanted to say, but I never ended up spitting anything out. It’s something I want to work on desperately. I’m tired of feeling embarrassed to speak a language I’m literally fluent in, but I have no clue where to start. Maybe I will bring this up to my mom but I already know what she’s going to say. We’ll see.