I Just Wanted To Escape… And Learn
I have been a language addict for as long as I can remember. The earliest memory of something I wanted strongly dates back from 1998 when I was still about 8 years old on holidays in Italy.
I asked a vendor by the beach how to say numbers in Italian so I could understand the price of the toys he was selling and I wanted.
Many many years later, I figured this had been the very first interest in languages I had. What kicked off this love for languages but my parents proved me wrong.
When I was about 20 years old, they took out a cassette of my father asking me about my goals when I was about 4 years old.
My answer shocked me.
I told him I was going to leave the house and go around the world to learn all the languages in the world and communicate with anybody I wanted.
How did this idea come to my mind? No idea.
Since I was a child, my parents always made a point to go travel whether in France but I believe we really started to go abroad after this conversation so that couldn’t be it.
One possibility I found though was the importance of stories told by my parents.
Back then, my father had been traveling around Europe for a long time, taking part in a few movies as a sound engineer and he was telling us stories, bringing gifts.
My mother, on her side, has always been a bookworm. Trying to share her passion with me, she kept on reading me stories about everything constantly.
The connection between them must have created an attraction for discovery, a thirst for learning new things.
My curiosity was picked in my earliest age and shaped my entire life without even realizing it myself.
Thinking about this made me understand the importance of knowing your roots.
All around us, in self-development, you hear about the importance of the present above past and future. Yet, the present is the way it is thanks to what happened in the past.
Refusing to acknowledge your past will only cause you current action to be misplaced, not to fit your personality.
Being aware of why I am who I am is what allows me to be at peace with comments that I am weird for being that passionate with language.
For more than a decade, I have been considered by my surroundings as someone weird. Spending so much time on learning languages is often looking down upon.
But the day I discovered why I grew up to become this man, I got the closure I needed to appreciate it, to move on and stop trying to justify myself.
I am who I am. Accept me or don’t, but I will keep on being myself and evolve further.
Learn to understand yourself so you can endure everything coming your way.
