In January 2021, I wrote a long, unstructured passage in Spanish, full of phrases like “ese manto gris perenne que es el cielo de enero” (“ever-gray January sky”) and “hablas en pasado para tratar de poner un poco de distancia” (“you speak in the past tense to gain some distance”). The diary entry read as if it was rushed to the page unfiltered, straight from the brain. Writing a diary in English forced me to dig for precise words, slowing down my thinking and taming my thoughts.
Through English, navigating life’s concerns became more bearable, and what started as the only way to write about a relationship turned into a therapeutic practice of self-analysis. Last summer I was caught in an identity crisis: I felt emotionally stuck between A Coruña, my hometown, and Brooklyn, where I currently live. Neither place seemed to fully suit me, and writing about that despair in English gave me the space for deeper introspection. “Is it possible to feel settled somewhere,” I wrote, “when part of who you are depends on constantly leaving?” Detaching from the rawness of my native tongue, one that would otherwise make me spew out words in torrents, had finally helped me understand myself.
Ismael Ramos, a writer from my hometown, disagrees. He believes his work, much of which is intimate poetry, comes alive in his native Galician — a language related to Spanish and Portuguese that is also my father and grandmother’s native tongue. Decoupling his language from his experience is inherently challenging, especially while dealing with his emotions. “There is a language of your body,” Mr. Ramos told me. He is right: Writing in English feels unnatural, and it will never be as close to my heart as Spanish. Yet it is freeing because it is unnatural. In the blog I kept as a foreign exchange student at a high school in Lawrenceville, Ga., and in my college diaries when I lived in Madrid, I tried to make sense of my reality in the familiar passivity of my mother tongue. But such proximity fell short when it was time to analyze my feelings.
“You no longer see an impending possibility every time you look at him,” I wrote about my ex in my diary last April. “He is no longer a promise that feels as if it will never arrive.” Such phrases would never come naturally to me in Spanish, but switching to my second language serves as scaffolding, a structure that frees me from a linguistic mind-set that often just constrains the way I understand myself.
Other writers have embraced the practice of keeping a diary in a second or third language. Jhumpa Lahiri learned Italian as a way to find herself. “I don’t recognize the person who is writing in this diary,” she wrote a decade ago. “But I know that it’s the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me.” Curiously, I felt most candid while writing a diary in Spanish, exposed to a rhythm that has guided me since birth. Trying to make sense of myself through once foreign words carries a discomfort, but my English diary acts as a refuge from my frantic mind, a conscious journey into a language whose distance helps me unearth parts of my identity and understand them more deeply.
