One warm evening in March 2022, I left my apartment for a first date. At the time, busy with graduate studies, I wasn’t keeping a journal, so most memories from that night—and the ones following—come from a few messages I sent to friends back in Spain. Soon, the man I met and I were seeing each other regularly, oscillating between what I would describe as a relationship in Spanish and what English speakers might call a "situationship"—a concept without a clear counterpart in my native language.
After we parted ways a few months later, I decided to start writing about him in a diary. I chose English, his native tongue and the language that had connected us—my second language. Writing about him in English allowed me to express a sense of meaning and hope. “I wish we don’t end up as two polite strangers, scattered memories of another time,” I wrote in December 2022.
What began as a heartache-driven exercise soon became an opportunity to reflect on my broader reality in ways I never could in Spanish, offering a fresh perspective to rethink myself and my emotions.
Keeping a diary in my second language turned me into an observer of my own feelings, granting clarity that the intimacy of my mother tongue often obscures. During the pandemic, a Spanish diary helped fill the emptiness of time that felt meaningless, but in hindsight, much of what I wrote then was shaped by the closeness of my native language, which limited my ability to think objectively.
In January 2021, I penned a lengthy, unstructured entry in Spanish filled with phrases like “ese manto gris perenne que es el cielo de enero” ("the ever-gray January sky") and “hablas en pasado para tratar de poner un poco de distancia” ("you speak in the past tense to create some distance"). The entry felt raw and unfiltered, rushed straight from my mind. Writing in English required me to search for precise expressions, slowing down my thoughts and bringing order to my emotions.
Through English, grappling with life’s challenges became more manageable. What started as a way to document a relationship evolved into a therapeutic practice of self-examination. Last summer, caught in an identity crisis, I felt emotionally suspended between A Coruña, my hometown, and Brooklyn, where I live now. Neither place felt wholly mine, and writing about that turmoil in English provided the space for deeper introspection. “Is it possible to feel settled somewhere,” I asked myself, “when part of who you are depends on constantly leaving?” Distancing myself from the rawness of my native tongue, which would otherwise flood me with words, finally helped me gain a clearer understanding of myself.
