Last night I had a dream that scared me more than death. 😂
In the dream, I suddenly couldn’t understand English anymore.
Everyone around me kept talking, laughing, ordering coffee, living their little productive lives, while I stood there hearing what sounded like a blender drowning in a bathtub. Their mouths moved. Their faces reacted. The world kept functioning perfectly fine without me in it.
And I remember panicking.
Not movie panic. No screaming. No dramatic running through rain.
The quiet kind.
The kind where your brain goes:
“Oh no. I’m trapped inside myself again.”
I woke up sweating, and for a few seconds I still felt it. That horrible distance between me and everyone else. Like being alive behind soundproof glass. 🥲
Then I remembered:
this wasn’t really a dream.
It already happened to me once.
When I first came to the United States, my English was awful.
People love turning immigration into an inspirational LinkedIn post. “A brave new beginning.” “Chasing opportunity.” “Building a better future.”
What they usually mean is:
you spend several years feeling like a haunted Roomba bumping into society.
Not actually stupid, obviously.
But socially? Emotionally? Functionally?
Absolutely cooked.
You can have complicated thoughts about philosophy, love, politics, mortality — entire galaxies inside your head 🙂 — and then someone asks you a question in class and all you can produce is:
“Yes.”
Apparently the answer was not yes.
Everyone laughs.
Beautiful. Incredible. Glad we’re all having fun.
There’s a very specific kind of humiliation that comes with not speaking the language. I remember a couple classmates used to trap me in a classroom after school. They’d close the door, stand in front of it, and start asking me questions.
I didn’t fully understand what they were saying.
But I understood enough.
I understood they were bored.
I understood I was the entertainment.
And I understood fear perfectly.
Honestly, fear is one of the first languages immigrants become fluent in.
So I’d randomly answer yes or no to their questions.
Every time, they’d burst out laughing.
To this day, I still don’t know what they asked me.
Maybe it was harmless.
Maybe it was cruel.
Maybe they asked if I ate rats.
Maybe they asked if I had twelve husbands.
Maybe they asked if I personally invented communism in a cave somewhere.
Who knows.
The audience loved it though.
And I remember standing there smiling nervously while my body waited for it to be over. 🐥
That’s the ugly thing about humiliation:
your brain doesn’t process the shame first.
It processes survival.
Years later, I still remember that classroom more clearly than most birthdays.
The fluorescent lights.
The smell of dry erase markers.
The sound of shoes scraping the floor.
The laughter.
And the feeling that I had somehow shrunk into something less than human.
The weirdest part is they probably forgot all of it already.
To them, I was probably just some awkward Chinese girl with broken English who said weird things.
A background character.
Comic relief.
Diversity DLC.
Meanwhile those moments buried themselves so deep inside me that my subconscious still digs them up randomly at night ike an emotionally unstable archaeologist.
“Hey remember when existing felt humiliating?”
Thanks, brain.
Very healthy behavior.
Objectively speaking, I survived.
I learned English.
I studied. I studied hard.
Now I argue with people about molecular biology and immunology in English, which honestly feels like the world’s nerdiest revenge story.
Externally, none of that can really hurt me anymore.
But shame is strange.
Shame doesn’t care about time.
Your adult brain can understand that kids are cruel, immigrants struggle, language barriers are temporary, and none of it determines your worth.
Meanwhile, your nervous system is still trapped in that classroom, waiting for someone to let you leave.
Sometimes, when you hear one strange laugh you don’t recognize, your body doesn’t hear laughter. It hears bullying again.
And when you see one English word you don’t recognize, you start doubting your entire vocabulary. You feel like that one word must be important, like it contains the secret meaning of the whole sentence, and somehow everyone else received the instruction manual except you.
I think people underestimate what language actually is.
Language isn’t just vocabulary.
It’s dignity.
It’s being able to defend yourself before people decide who you are.
It’s being able to explain a joke instead of becoming one.
It’s saying “stop.”
It’s saying “you misunderstood me.”
It’s saying “I’m smarter than I sound right now.”
Without language, your inner world gets locked behind glass while strangers narrate your identity for you.
And maybe that’s why the dream scared me so much.
Because for a few seconds, I became that version of myself again.
The one whose mind was fully alive while everyone mistook silence for emptiness.
Honestly, I think a lot of immigrants walk around carrying entire graveyards of humiliation inside them while pretending they’re fine.
And most of the time, nobody notices.
Which is probably why so many of us become funny.
If people are going to laugh anyway, you might as well hold the knife yourself. 🙂
Anyway.
At least now when people laugh after I answer a question, it’s usually because I meant to be funny.
Usually.
