How to stick with it

A hobby becomes a love

Last week, I was feeling insecure about something.

I know, something new and different for me!!

That thing was…that I don’t have a “thing.”

I was lamenting my lack of “thing” to my Spanish teacher, whom I’ve met with online twice a week for the past almost-four years.

She doesn’t really teach me so much as let me babble on and on to her, rambling about such-and-such or complaining about this-and-that.

She pipes in with a verb correction here and there, but most of the time she lets me go on about my fixation of the week with saintly patience.

If only she weren’t so hard to look at!

Last time, my fixation was the aforementioned lack of thing.

I explained that I know people who are really into jiu-jitsu, or community choir, or tango dancing or collage-making or cooking-class-taking or hiking or ceramics or (dare I say) pickleball.

And I don’t have that. That one thing.

Lord knows I’ve tried! I’ve dreamt of being a prodigy, specialist, expert, maestra—whatever—my whole life. My entire childhood was one big patchwork of various obsessions that I took on as my personality-of-the-week, until another one took its place.

In early adolescence during the early internet, I would search for an early version of memes in the form of lists on Geocities webpages such as, “You know you’re an Irish step dancer when….” and rejoice in the feeling of being a part of something specific and all-consuming. Until the next month.

According to my human design profile, I’m a “manifesting generator,” meaning that I’m on earth to continually generate a lot of ideas, whereas some other people are here to see ideas all the way through.

Contrary to my numerology though, I really just want to belong to a club and get the t-shirt.

My problem is that I’ve never been disciplined enough to get the t-shirt. Or committed. Or focused. Or something. Or maybe, there are just too many things! How to pick one??

This is what I was stumbling through explaining to my dear teacher the other day.

After I ran out of breath, she said, “You’re a writer, and artist, and you give talks, and you speak Spanish…those are some things.”

And I said, “Oh.”

She went on to mention that she’s been a teacher to hundreds of students. And only two of them (ahem, yours truly included) have stuck with Spanish over a length of time.

She told me that, from what she’s seen, it’s extremely rare for a native English speaker (who didn’t grow up speaking any other languages) to go out of their way to fully learn another language.

They might get a few lessons before a vacation, or try it out for fun and realize it’s harder than they thought, but rarely is any English-only-speaker interested in becoming bilingual.

She reminded me, “Spanish is a thing.”

Hmph, I thought.

Because I know so many people who speak many languages, I already feel like I’m at a deficit. And isn’t Spanish supposed to be super easy!? There’s no new alphabet to learn, there are tons of cognates, we see it everywhere, I lived in Chile, and I *STILL* have trouble grasping all of Love is Blind Mexico.

It almost seems like a skill I should already have than one I’m working up to, so I forget it’s a “thing.” But maybe it is.

Andrea took this conversation to ask me, “Why do you do it? Why do you stick with it? I’ve had a lot of students not stick with it—the vast majority don’t. So why keep coming back? What motivates you?”

My first reaction is that, at this point, after 3.5 years of semiweekly conversation (i.e. impassioned ranting on my part), she’s basically my best friend.

But I let her question sink into my mind with some gravity, and I concluded, “It’s because Spanish became an art.”

Spanish used to be science for me, and now it’s an art.

And this is my key to sticking with something: the transformation from science into art.

Now, don’t get it twisted, I don’t want to polarize those terms; art is scientific and science is artful and it’s a BIG bummer on so many levels that our cultural verbiage separates them. I’m only doing so for ease of communication. I think you can probably assume what I mean when I use the words in opposition—just know that I don’t want to. :)

When I think about the “science” of Spanish, I think about grammar, syntax, spelling, conjugation, structure….all the stuff that can be explained in charts. And, for the record, I really enjoy that stuff! Give me rules, tradition, and order any day of the week; I’m totally here for it.

But it’s not why I’ve stuck with Spanish.

The reason why I’ve stuck around is because of all the stuff that you can’t put on a chart.

I’m talking: How does the existence of a subjunctive tense enrich a brain’s emotional engagement with the subject matter?

I’m talking: How does the straightforwardness/directness of Spanish (as opposed to English’s constant dancing-around) affect relationships between speakers?

I’m talking: What are all the nuances among the synonyms mañoso, delicado, quisquilloso, exigente, especial, complicado, selectivo, escrupuloso, caprichoso, minuscioso, or any other word that translates as “picky” in the Eng-Esp dictionary? Which one would I use to describe a discerning palate vs a fake gluten allergy vs a whiny child vs a famous sommelier?

I’m talking: How can a living language be a history lesson? For example, Spanish in Spain is still much more authoritative than Latin American Spanish (which in some countries is downright submissive), speaking to a colonist-colonized relationship upheld during a simple coffee order to this day.

Or, all the words that tell the story of the Vandals’ crossing of the Pyrenees into Spain—the first wave of Germanic invasions in the year 400. They permanently left their linguistic mark on the language with virile words like guerra (war), orgullo (pride), ganar (to win), and Hispanicized versions of the hot Visigoth names at the time like Alvaro (Allwars), Rodrigo (Hrothriks), and Hernando (Frithnanth).

Not to mention the Moorish rule, which gave Spain a long history of art, science, gorgeous architecture, and over 4,000 “Arabisms” we still use today, like azul (blue), cero (zero), azúcar (sugar), limón (lime), and the ever-important arroz (rice).

As you can tell by now, I LOVE THIS STUFF!!!

I am in love with this stuff. To the point where, when I hear Spanish being spoken out in the wild, a rabble of butterflies flitter around my tummy as though I just saw a movie star.

It’s not because Spanish is the most objectively beautiful language (I don’t think it is) or even the most subjectively beautiful language to me (it’s not), but because I’m in love with it.

And I fell in love with it when it became art to me.

These days, I’m far more interested in making the language my own—using antiquated phrases, playing with words, cracking jokes that land in another culture, expressing my emotions precisely…all the things I love to do with English—than getting a preposition right. I respect the language too much as a living thing for that.

I want to appreciate it as the creation it is, rather than approach it as an inanimate chart I can dominate.

And this is how I’ve stuck with anything. Writing. Painting. Felting. Cooking. Dancing. New York. Marriage.

I don’t bring up the patriarchy often, but when I do, it’s to complain about this tendency I see in myself and my culture at large: The desire to squash a living-breathing-wild-beautiful thing into bullet points or a life hack or a pro tip.

I, too, have tried to suck the life out of creativity and make it my servant by squishing it into routines, guided journals, apps, and 5 steps.

But, just like a panther kept in a cage, disrespecting its alive-ness and wildness will take its life. You can’t find much wonder in a living thing whose spirit is broken. And you can’t be in awe of creativity and want to dominate it at the same time.

You have to love it, respect it, praise its wildness, and then maybe tame it the same way that Native Americans once tamed thunderbirds: by listening.

I took French for 15 years, and thanks to the Parisian tutor I had as a child insisted upon by my freakishly genius dad who spoke many languages effortlessly and fluently, I had a pretty good accent.

I took the advanced classes, I watched French news (the francophone pronunciation of ‘Donald Rumsfeld’ is a core memory of my adolescence), I read Harry Potter à L’École des Sorciers…but, ultimately, it didn’t stick.

Maybe I had a crush on French, but I wasn’t in love with it.

French was an ideal for me, a means to some abstract end: me being seen as smart, me being taken seriously, me speaking the language of poetry and the intellect, me being loved by my dad (oops, too far, sorry).

I didn’t respect it. I wanted to dominate it, own it, control it. I wanted it to obey me and get me ahead.

I didn’t have any love for its story, its wildness, its living-thing-ness. When it didn’t give me exactly what I wanted, or turn me into the person I dreamt of being, or do what I commanded it to do, I lost interest. It wasn’t serving me.

But is that what a hobby should do? Is that what a loved one—or thing—should do? Serve us?

As I mentioned in my July Loves, I got VERY into the Olympics this year. I think athletes are just the coolest, and nothing delivers the sensation of awe for me quite like watching people push themselves to the limits of what humans can achieve. (Especially TEAM USA!!!! :)

But there were definitely some athletes I loved watching more than others—and some who just made me sad.

That’s because, intuitively, or even sometimes explicitly, I could tell who was really enjoying their sport and who wasn’t. And, directly related, I could tell who had profound reverence for their sport, and who was using it as an ego surge.

I vividly remember during the last Winter Olympics, a figure skater was caught on mic screaming, “I hate this sport! I won’t go onto the ice again!”

I felt soooo badly for her because I’ve been there—with ballet, with academics, and certainly with French.

I wanted to crush them and kill it, so to speak (but isn’t it interesting how language affects our perspective?!), and, surprise surprise, they just let me down.

Hot tip: You can’t punish an animal into perfect behavior, and you can’t punish your way into perfection either.

I mean, you can, but I guarantee you’ll be echoing that ice skater’s sentiments.

Here’s a way to figure out if you’re in love with your “thing:” How would you feel if you quit?

I quit French during college, and have only regretted it in a conceptual way (see also: piano lessons). Like, I should probably keep that up once in a while kind of way.

If I were to quit pursuing Spanish, a part of me would die.

I know it sounds dramatic, but a part of me would literally cease to exist.

At this point, there is a part of myself that I only express while speaking Spanish (see also: dance). I could find other ways to unbury those parts, but there would be real loss and grief involved.

Maybe my “things” are so much a part of me that I don’t recognize them as “things” (whereas, if I started a ceramics class today, you’d never hear the end of it :).

Maybe it’s like, how, when you have a crush, you never shut up about it. But when you’re deeply in love with someone, where do you even begin?

I told my therapist that I don’t have words to describe how I feel when I’m dancing. The feeling transcends language.

The most accurate and also hokiest way I can articulate it is…being visited by a spirit? Who I commune with? And gives me glimmers of the divine? And I go beyond myself? You know?

Something like love, indeed.

I can tell when I’m not falling in love: when “the thing” remains in chart-form, or whatever version of a chart it takes.

I can tell I’m out of love when I’ll abandon “the thing” the moment it stops giving me external validation.

And I can tell it wasn’t for me to begin with when I realized I never really respected it in the first place.

My favorite word in Spanish is one of those 4,000 “Arabisms” I mentioned—the expression ‘ojalá.’

Arabic-speakers may instantly recognize its similarity to ‘Inshallah (إن شاء الله),’ a flawless exclamation that literally means “If God wills it,” and has countless uses which all speak to Arab culture’s embrace of mystery, comfort with uncertainty, and diminishment of the self.

Indeed, Ojalá comes directly from Inshallah, and I use it interchangeably with “I hope so!” or any synonyms of “Fingers crossed!”

While Turkey somewhat successfully "de-arabicized" Turkish by rigorously forcing media and schools to only use (re-)invented Turkic words over a period of decades, Spain never got rid of its Arab influence, even on language, even during the Inquisition. Spaniards still continue to shout ‘Olé!’ (from Allah) when they witness something otherworldy.

While Ojalá is one of those grandma words I love, I think it’s just perfect, and a perfect microcosm of so much of what I adore about Latin culture. Maybe it’ll happen! Who knows! Hope so! God willing! Not sure! Let’s dance!

Not to get too deep in my own metaphor, but…isn’t that what human relationship love is like too?

Friends and I joke that the more lovey-dovey a couple appears on social media, the more insecure they are about their relationship (I’m sure some of you are fine :). In the relationships I admire most, I observe a sound “knowing,” rather than a sharp “certainty.”

A priest once told me that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt, but certainty, and I’ve extended that philosophy to so many things I love in life.

I was certain about French, until I wasn’t.

I was so sure about academics, until I got a bad grade.

I thought I hated math, until I realized it was art.

I thought I was bad at Spanish, until I learned to be funny.

Is it my “thing,” and will it be my “thing” forever? As long as I keep laughing, as long as I keep being surprised, as long as I still get butterflies, as long as I keep falling in love, ojalá, ojalá, ojalá.