Fluency That Cost Intimacy

I went years without speaking Ekegusii in any meaningful way. Not because I was ashamed of it. Because the days kept arriving in English, and the English was fast and useful and got things done.

What I lost in that stretch was harder to name than a word. It was a quality of inner attention that the older language made possible. A particular softness. The vocabulary for the things that happen before you decide what to feel.

You have a language like that. It may not be Ekegusii. It may be the idiom of your neighborhood, or the register your mother used when you were sick, or the particular humor that your closest childhood friend understood without explanation. Whatever it is, you have been translating it out of your days for a long time.

I am not telling you to stop code-switching. I am telling you to remember that the code-switch is a tool, not an identity. The original is still there.

One sentence this week, in the register that feels most like home, even if you say it only to yourself.

— Job