Maybe I should do this in English?

Lately I’ve been having difficulties writing. Trying to form sentences in Swedish has been quite a struggle – for months, really. I get stuck in my head and the words are trying to kill me. Since writing is my only therapy now, I really need the process to work. But everything is frozen and nothing moves voluntarily out of my head, so a single blog post takes several days to write.

Recently I wrote a letter in English. A real letter, on paper. Sure, I typed it on the laptop and printed it. But it got put in an envelope with a stamp and everything, and then sent far, far away. That one was really easy to write. It didn’t really take any effort at all. I had more trouble deciding what to leave out. Can’t really send a small book’s worth of pages to people.

My language skills aren’t that good, so the word flow should have been slower with the change to English. It would have made more sense for the writing to get harder. So why was it much easier writing in English?

Maybe it was the content of the letter. It was really important for me to write and send that letter. Kind of as a confirmation of all the personal growth that I’ve been going through. A very significant step for me. Or maybe it was the one way communication-feeling of it all that made is easy.

When I think of it, this shifting of languages has been going on for a while. A few months ago I took part in an online workshop and I remember being surprised that all my notes were in English. I thought I wrote them in Swedish. This has happened a couple of times since then too.

It’s like when I’m sure I’m speaking Finnish with my parents, and I’m not. Nowadays I’m thinking I speak Swedish when I’m really not.

Half of the conversations I have with my son are in English for some reason, and there are days when I have to translate a lot of my thoughts from English before I speak. Most of the endless monologues in my head are not in Swedish anymore.

I haven’t read a Swedish book in a long time. Almost every book I read nowadays is in English. Some of them are in so advanced English that I have to read them in the bathtub in order to understand. Don’t ask, but the bath water might be magic. It seems to be possessing some sort of translation abilities.

This is all a bit weird to me.

So. What I really wanted to say was that you can expect different languages appearing here in the future.