Two languages = two personalities?

Apologies for my lack of posting, I have been sitting over a pad of paper trying to overcome one of my biggest writer’s blocks yet. The genre that is so suddenly making me question my ability to string a coherent sentence together: The Condolences Card, aka the letter of sincere sympathy.

My mother’s younger brother hanged himself last weekend. He was young, it’s tragic, it doesn’t seem real or even possible. Today my mum called to remind me that ... Would I please send a condolences card to my grandparents. I’m embarrassed she thinks I am so heartless that I did not think of sending something. But it’s been a week already, so what is the big deal? Well, here’s a confession I need to make: I find it impossible to express feelings in my native language. Yeah, the words in Czech just aren’t coming.

In English, sentences like “I am saddened by ...” and “I am so sorry” ... and “my thoughts are with you” ... and “if you need anything” seem easy. But in Czech? Those same sentences do not seem to exist in my mental dictionary, and if I translate them literally, they sound completely ridiculous. My Sincere Sympathy suddenly sounds stiff and insincere.

Is it the language, or is it me? A few months ago, over cocktails in Prague, my friends touched on the topic.

“How do you say I love you in Czech?” my Mexican friend L. asked. It was her first time in Prague and she was excited to be there, in my country, and wanted to learn the most important words in my native language. She has a typical Latin American personality -- feelings are the sine curve that pretty much rules her day-to-day life.
“It’s Miluji Tě,” I said, “but that’s the formal way. It sounds kind of weird to me ... I don’t know, I’ve never dated a Czech guy, so I’ve never had to say it!”
“Then how do you say it to your girlfriend???” she turned to my friend K., who does actually live in Prague and who is in a relationship with a Czech girl.
His sobering reply: “I don’t say it.”

So maybe Czechs and the open expression of feelings just don’t gel so hot. I’ve certainly never heard my parents say anything like I LOVE YOU to me, even though I’m pretty sure they do love me. I remember hearing “I like you” from my dad precisely twice, and both times it was a Big Deal at significant points in our lives. It was so rare and special; it really touched my heart. The natural thing to say, in English, would be “me too”. Two words! I mean, what is the big deal about that? But I didn’t say it to him. It was too awkward. I choose avoidance. I changed the topic to something mundane.

Maybe it’s not the language, maybe it’s just me and my family? My friend Z., an expat like me, insists that your second language (a language which you only start using fully as an adult) is the one in which you finally find the freedom to express who you really are, without the social constraints with which you had been brought up. Our parents, our teachers, our peers all condition us to think what kind of behaviour is acceptable, which also forces us to say certain things and prevents us from saying certain other things. The longer we are subjected to this kind of scrutiny, the more it becomes the fabric of how we behave, affecting our language to an extent that would give the impression that we might have two distinct personalities: the native-language personality and the second-language personality. We learn language by listening and mimicking – if people around us, in our first language, never say I love you, then this very sentence will seem unusual to us and we will rarely use it. On the other hand, if people who speak our second language say I love you all the time, it will become natural for us to use this sentence frequently as well. Over time, a gap might develop between the typical things we say in each language, even if the literal meaning of the sentences in question is identical. We become two different people.

So am I really heartless? I don’t think so ... it’s just that, unlike my brain, my heart does not seem to be semantically bilingual.