The first man I truly loved had a very particular way of speaking, punctuating his words with a casual slang that did not immediately suggest his deeply intellectual nature.

From the moment I met him, I was both charmed and repelled by this contrast. With time, I too began to borrow his verbal habits, saying “Word” to close a text conversation or “Nailed it” in a slightly flippant tone, wanting, perhaps subconsciously, to increase the connection between the two of us.

When the relationship inevitably ended, long after the potency of the immediate memories had faded, his language still managed to take root in my own. Here I was, standing in line, waiting for coffee, and my careless tossing-off of “Word” to the barista could quickly send me on a journey through a painful past. It seemed unfair, that even my own speech could betray me.

Yet I inadvertently thought I had found a solution to this dilemma when I moved to Rome at 27. Here, I could speak Italian, a language free of any traumatic associations. I was finally being handed a completely clean slate. I had not been raised in this culture, and my word choice did not bring with it memories of arguments, of ruptures, of alienation or insecurity. There was no reason to wince at “farcela” or “andarsene”—they carried with them no emotional valence. They were simply clinical, existing only as concepts to be learned.

Perhaps unwittingly, I was also seeking a kind of creative liberation. I was certainly not the first writer to abandon my mother tongue in favor of another, in favor, even, of Italian. Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri has become, for better or worse, a sort of expert on linguistic expatriates in Italy. The abbreviated narrative on Lahiri is as follows: after a long-standing interest in the Italian language and immense, well-deserved literary success in English (she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in her early 30s), she moved to Rome with her family in 2012, where she dedicated herself fully to reading, speaking, and writing in Italian. In a 2016 interview, she said she did not know if she would return to writing in English.

Lahiri has often depicted her language journey as a love affair, at times reminiscent of “Romeo and Juliet,” star-crossed lovers so destined to meet that their path exists separate from any social or geopolitical context. She has praised the freedom that has come with, to some degree, abandoning Bengali, the language she grew up speaking but in which she never learned to read and write, and English, the language in which she was taught. 

“Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules, that I can be who I want and write what I want on my own terms,” she told The Paris Review in a 2024 interview. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own.”

I could love this idea if I could believe it, but I think the minute we start to really inhabit a language is the minute that it loses any kind of neutrality. It is perhaps true that a non-native language may be free of certain prisons—only to constrain us with others. Language learning, in my mind, was simply a version of the old adage: Wherever you go, there you are. Yes, maybe you expressed yourself differently, limited in some ways by your capacity or your linguistic context, but ultimately, there was still an Essential Self that came through.

In my first months in this country, my Italian class was always a source of excitement, a setting that brought with it limitless opportunities to expand my knowledge, to communicate differently, to convey something more deeply. But as the language went from an abstract to a lived reality, the lesson itself could be a haunting reminder of conversations and people I no longer wanted to remember.

I longed for a world in which Italian could be a completely clean language, in which its very use had never and could never cause me pain. The problem with that world was that it didn’t exist.

Still, Italian did offer something that in English always seemed to elude me: a kind of emotional distance. A knife wound in an argument didn’t cut quite so deep, because I found myself also puzzling over the linguistic choices.

“Sorry, sorry,” a part of me wanted to say to my interlocutor, “that was, frankly, brutal, but why, exactly, did you choose to use congiuntivo imperfetto instead of trapassato?”

Each conversation was a linguistic and anthropological minefield. In this way, I could divest myself just a little bit from the emotional ramifications, preferring instead to view the person in front of me as a subject of study, tightening the belt of my metaphorical trench-coat and holding my magnifying glass up to the light.

Occasionally, this distance occurred naturally—from a lack of literal understanding. Early on in my Italian relationships, I still found myself mentally cataloguing every word, the way I might when conducting an interview. I wasn’t able to listen in a truly passive way, and so, I often missed any perceived slights or underlying tones.

But as my Italian improved, I lost some of this literal delay—I could understand, with some ease, most things as they were being said—but the effect of the words was still processed in the same way. My best friend and I had met each other in Italian class, and so, despite her immaculate English, we had decided to start our friendship in Italian. Each time I nestled into the warmth of her Prati apartment, I would recount the latest update in my personal life and watch as her face fell with inevitable disappointment. She didn’t even have to say what I knew she was thinking: “You did what? Again? Why?!”

But her chastising talks never managed to truly pierce me—because being reminded of my various missteps in Italian simply didn’t hurt as much. It was the difference between the prick of a safety-pin and a blood draw—the needle simply never went past the surface.

In this way, I understood what Lahiri meant about Italian clarifying my own voice—I, too, liked myself better in my second language. Maybe it was simply the internalized pat-on-the-back that came from speaking a language that wasn’t my own. Maybe it was because, in a second language, I allowed myself to make mistakes and to be curious about others’ choices, linguistic or otherwise.

Unlike Lahiri, I didn’t think that the answer ended in a sort of motivational speech: choose your language and free your mind. “It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own,” she had said. In a sense, this was also my experience, not because Italian offered me complete and utter freedom, but because the sheer act of language formation meant that I had less time and mental space to fixate on my general series of intrusive thoughts. You know, what I was doing wrong today, the next mistake I might possibly make, how I was different or worse or strange or simply not enough. Those voices, in my case, didn’t disappear, but they were just slightly crowded out by the more neutral, utilitarian voice that said: Now, if you use condizionale passato here, what should follow in the next clause? This was a task, a necessity—something I could handle. A sentence had to be shaped.

In English, language formation was no longer a conscious step. But it was the very consciousness of Italian that helped me to step out of the mental prison made of my own neuroses and into the physical world.