field notes: the importance of the redemption arc
An ode to no longer allowing experiences to be ruined for me forever, and why you should do the same
Welcome to field notes, my casual blogging platform within my Substack Messy Dialectic. If you are looking for refined essays and discourse, check here for the latest posts. If you love rambling, brain dumps, and chit-chats about life experiences, then continue reading on.
If you know me, then you know that I have been through an insane amount of stuff in the entirety of my life. In the interest of not trauma dumping and oversharing two decades of insanity in one post, you’ll simply have to trust me when I say that my life has truly been filled to the brim with misadventures and unfortunate circumstances until about a few months ago.
Being as young as I am while having gone through so much awful stuff, it’s a tough place to be as my ultimate goal has become harm reduction and “protecting my peace” (as people say these days), and in order to achieve these two goals, I have definitely taken many steps to isolate myself from situations that have burned me in the past. However, a new issue replaced all of my old ones: that methodology led to me creating a very sterile life that, yes, protected my peace, but also kept me from living my life and enjoying activities that I had been curious about pursuing in the first place.
That’s when I knew that I had to reframe and overwrite everything that had originally deterred me from my desires in the first place.
I’m currently doing this by (finally) joining other French enthusiasts (or Francophiles) in practicing speaking French. So far, it has been a total breath of fresh air. It pales in comparison to every other experience that I had growing up and doing French 1, 2, and 3 in high school in which I was met with some sort of nonsense from both teachers and students for being a Black girl in French class, and that as a Black woman, I suppose that the only language I am “allowed” to know is English.
Despite that awful experience, I am now immersed in this community of extremely kind individuals, from young adults to the older folks, who simply want to practice speaking a language that greatly interests them.
I can’t quite pinpoint where my love and interest in the French language comes from. Maybe it’s from when I learned as a child that my side of the family is Creole and then further learned of its proximity to French-ness, or perhaps it’s from me being shaped by those images from the early 2000s that depicted waif thin girls in Paris with shopping bags, coffees, and chic outfits. Hell, it might even be from seeing so much Parisian paraphernalia in Walmart and Michaels as a child (does anyone else remember seeing an abundance of Eiffel Tower paperweights and journals with Parisian bakeries on them in the 2000s? I know it’s not just me).
But what I know for a fact is that two decades have passed and I am still enamored by this imagery and this idea that I, too, could one day speak French and step into any of these images (minus the waif thin quality of course).
My last French class was in 2014, and I was more than happy to finally be done with that chapter of my life. Finally done with the shame of being a Black girl who was, yes, beyond proficient at English but seen as stupid for having only known one language while also being shamed for attempting to learn another, finally done with being ogled for being a Black girl in a language class even though I had to choose a language to graduate anyway, and away from the teachers who judged me for not catching on to the language as fast as my peers who already knew two languages, thus making the concepts of French (like conjugations and the fact that all words are gendered and you do have to keep that in mind when utilizing the language) a much easier concept for them than it did for me.
Once I got to college, I threw away any notion of learning any language. I even threw away an opportunity to learn ASL (another interest of mine at the time) at the collegiate level simply because of my rough experiences in high school and the impact that those experiences had on me.
But I don’t know. Something clicked in my mind—now a whole decade after my last French class—that has just kept dragging me back to French. It’s just like people always say these days: the process of growing and aging and healing happily is just you walking back to yourself and finding yourself through all the muck of what the world has tried to convince you to be. And for some reason, I have suddenly felt this pull back to myself despite my fierce desire to run far, far away from those days of being teased and tormented.
So, I did it. I reopened Duolingo for the first time in well over a year (which the app was sure to let me know lol), and I brushed up on my French fundamentals. Shockingly enough, I remember more than I thought I would. Simultaneously, my French interest group (that I have been in for years without having attended a single session, mind you) created a new meeting time that worked much better for me, and I forced myself to attend.
As mentioned above, the folks who I met were just so nice and incredible and welcoming. They were really helpful and definitely helped with all the nervousness that I was experiencing at the time, given that I hadn’t practiced speaking French with someone in a decade. Funnily enough, I did end up forgetting a lot of the words that I knew because of how nervous I was, but I know that in time I’ll be able to recall my vocab much better.
It was all just such a total shock to my system, and it really made me realize how important it is to allow yourself to rewrite the awful things that we’ve experienced in life.
In the same way that I shouldn’t stop eating at all restaurants simply because of a bad experience at one (or several), I also shouldn’t forgo a whole interest of mine simply because people had ruined that for me for three whole years.
Looking back, I think that the whole three years part was one of the biggest deterrents to me further pursing something that could potentially result in a potential three more years of suffering, but now that I was brave enough and allowed this experience to redeem my impression of what my life could look like as a Francophile, I can now enjoy a lifetime of casually enjoying this interest that refuses to leave my side.
I wonder what I’ll retry next.