languages of removal

Português brasileiro, Brazilian Portuguese is my latest language of distance. I am learning it and as it carries no emotional valence for me as of yet, my oral exams are like therapy sessions. Why? Because I get to rant about my life in a language whose signs trigger no emotional memory for me. I am just a neutral passenger, a lawyer cross-examining my consciousness through a vocabulary void of all personal significance.

I get to watch the strange sounds falling out of my mouth, as I "feel" whatever the initial language was telling me to feel. The two languages are temporally and emotionally disassociated. The two languages strip apart my feelings, partitions into the self, and I get to watch.

My brain absorbs new vocabularies quickly, but especially when I'm trying to express myself. Then suddenly whatever new language I'm learning starts to spill out of me imperfectly but forcefully like water. I can feel the meanings lining up like little train tracks, the cogs clicking a new outline of expression into place. A code on a code, a new alignment.

When pain feels language-less, when whatever distress you may feel is suddenly stripped of its vehicle in the strange liminal space of translation, the negative sensations themselves are somehow alienated from their associations. They sit in limbo, in an airport, at a train station, waiting, uncertain. It's a good way to leave your psychophysiological distress symptoms naked without any linguistic clothing to designate their identity.

Multilinguistic experiences demand a kind of clinical self-examination in which one can pick apart layers and interrogate them. Especially when one's thoughts spill out in someone else's sounds to talk about your life. Suddenly you can sit there and you're not even quite thinking about yourself in the first person any more. Just like here I am switching persons grammatically as I write this entry. I am switching between my selves.

**(These thoughts are based on both my own self experiences and my research; I often think that the most insightful thoughts should come from both.)