To exist in two languages, in my case my native tongue and English, implies having two identities.

Learning a foreign language as an adult is a tough mission. Even describing the process of learning a foreign language is not easy. All I could remember from those early immigrant days was a cacophony of sounds and the feeling of being isolated, vulnerable and insecure. At some point — and it didn’t take me long mostly because I didn’t have a choice but to dive into it — the fog started to lift, and the words began to connect with their meanings.

After that first crucial step, when enough of the new language is adopted for basic communication, many realize that they need more. Not everybody, of course. Some people, often elderly, stay there: they have their children and younger friends to help them when it’s necessary; for all other aspects of their lives, they have their support system in their language: doctors, lawyers, grocers, travel agents, newspapers, TV, church…

The younger, more educated population, people eloquent in their mother tongue, those who don’t want to stay pizza delivery drivers or security guards forever – they all know that they have to, somehow, narrow the gap between two languages.

That crack gets smaller with reading, watching TV, conversing, and, not less importantly, with mental readiness to accept new things, but it never disappears altogether. And there, in that thin crevice between two languages, our other identity is conceived.

When we learn our native tongue, we absorb with it the specific mentality and cultural climate related to it. Language shapes us in many ways; it makes us what we are. When we learn a foreign language, something similar happens, only in a milder form. Along with it, we soak in its civilizational background, forming spontaneously a new, parallel identity. The difference is in the fact that this second entity can never be completely integral because it doesn’t develop naturally, but rather, relatively speaking, under pressure.

Very rarely (almost never) do our children here learn to speak the language of their parents fluently. Even when they believe they know it, it’s on a superficial level and sounds broken, and not only because our language is grammatically much more complicated than English. After all, you can learn grammar, like any other logical concept. Language is not just a “structural system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary” but in equal measure the civilizational armature that supports it. That’s the reason why our language is so difficult for our kids to master – there is no identity it can latch on. It is not their mother tongue, it is not their, poetically speaking, “spiritual homeland”. They already have both.

For adult learners of a foreign language, the old and new could complement each other, coexist amicably, or they can clash — all this is mostly a matter of choice. What they cannot do is completely overlap.

I don’t think that many people consciously think about this ambivalence. I didn’t either until I started writing in English, years after I came here. My first significant achievement was no less than a 500-page book, and with it the realization that, when it comes to fiction, I could write it only in English. My novels and stories are a product of my adopted identity. They may be good or maybe not, it doesn’t matter; I like them. I don’t have high expectations of myself. I don’t want to be a “serious”, literary writer, or a bestselling author. I just want to do what I love doing.

If I ever attempted to do something that physically huge in my language (a 500-page book), I would face many obstacles: the expectations that I already mentioned, my education, my former literary taste (a steady diet of classics and literary fiction with almost guilty excursions into pop-fiction) and my much less complicated, guilt-free and more enjoyable present reading habits. What is pivotal, of course, is that I don’t have that kind of talent and abilities. I don’t have the creative capacity for literary fiction. I can read it, appreciate it (or not), but I wouldn’t be able to write it.

My imagination works on a different type of fuel — lighter, sunnier, less deep if you want. It’s entertaining in its essence, not artistic. (Same thing applies to my paintings – they’re decorations, visual joy, not art.) My English alter-ego is much better equipped to turn it into stories. English is like a shield behind which I found a refuge; it allows me to sail into my inner world without fear or prejudices, without hesitation. It gives me freedom I couldn’t dream I would have.

I write in my language as well, but this is limited to my “short forms”: my sentimental journeys into past, my memories about this and that. I write them mainly because they help me to glue my broken pieces (until the glue gets dry and things fall apart again). I wouldn’t be able to write them in English; their very source is in my original identity. I have to translate such pieces into English (which I’m doing right now with this post), balancing and peacekeeping my two linguistical/cultural selves.

Writing in my language offers me a different kind of freedom, though. I have all the words I need at my disposal, I don’t have to agonize over verb tenses and articles or whether I need commas or not. I can use colons, semi-colons, m-dashes… My language loves long, syntactically complex sentences, so I can write them a mile long (some of this spills into my English. My early editors often asked me to make two or three sentences out of one. Speaking of an editor, I don’t need her for my language. I used to be one, and I still am).

I had never thought that I would end up like this, with a “split personality”, or better, a double identity: two languages, two cultures, two ways of thinking, alternating constantly — and now more or less spontaneously — between them, always on crossroads, never on the road. The open road doesn’t exist anymore, not in my native identity, nor in my adopted one.

Sooner or later, we all accept the reality – we can never be whole again, not here, not in the old country. Yet again, this duality has its advantages. I see it as a lifelong entry pass to another life theatre, an opportunity to do something creative and fulfilling, to unlock my potentials, to discover the parts of myself I didn’t know I had, and I’m grateful for that.

Disclaimer: this is my personal experience, mingled with some well-known facts. I didn’t research it. This is a frequent conversational topic between me and some of my linguistically inclined friends existing in similar circumstances, and I believe they would understand what I was trying to say.