Naked in a second language
🦓 On writing exposed, emotional bugs, and a teenage password.
This is a weekly column of personal essays about weird feelings, memory glitches, and short stories that just feel true. If everyone’s performing, what’s wrong with pretending anyway?
Take this newsletter as a 4-minute pause. A scroll break. A little emotional exhale. ☕️
It’s not grammatically comfortable, sure, but being naked in a second language feels safer somehow. Like I’ve blurred myself just enough to be seen without flinching. It’s like getting undressed with the lights off — he has to fill in what his eyes can’t see with imagination, and I just have to hope for the best. When I first went topless in Palma de Mallorca, I prayed I wouldn’t hear Brazilian Portuguese nearby, then I realized it doesn’t matter. My body is mine, and it emits an intimate force. I have privacy regardless. Later, in a Finnish sauna beneath a sign that read: “Swimsuits prohibited”, that force became a solid truth.
Do you feel the controversy? It’s a mix of insecurity and dare, like I’m playing hide and seek. There’s nothing wrong with being fully naked, and I’m craving a nude version of my writing. Not for drama. Not even for courage points. Just because it feels necessary. Yet no matter how much I strip, this second language still wraps me in a transparent veil. Maybe it’s an illusion — a bell jar that makes me feel safe enough to undress and broadcast my voice, because there aren’t many like mine out there.
I got here through the side door, feeling like I’m running late, but I won’t mute — even though that sense of not belonging has turned into a talent for making things unnecessarily harder. It’s like an internal bug that makes me stretch extra hard just to feel like I deserve it. A false belief, I know, but it’s playing like it’s a set attribute. My mom says I put too much pressure on myself. I can even hear her voice saying “allow yourself…”. Instead, I signed up for three book clubs in one month, so I make sure I’ll read more. I squeeze another class. I tell people je comprends français and burn my brain to understand what they said, even though I’m on vacation and should be just relaxing. I thought I could understand if they spoke very slowly.
The thing is, something in me, probably broken, doesn’t seek comfort. It drags me into tension, challenge, and stress. Cortisol floods my body.
My therapist has taught me to recognize the spiral, though. And I have my little tools, my break-the-cycle techniques, to return to what I call my juicy, bubbly, wannabe life. Mostly journaling and avoiding my tarot decks, but also swimming in a lake or the sea. Naked, if possible. Water is my antidote to drama. So is L-theanine. That moment of stillness when the water shocks my skin and the world hushes helps me to turn off the automated circuits I have installed by default. The life I want to live requires a custom version — a freshly downloaded package for Finland. In this version, I have to be naked and let my body occupy the space. The water accommodates it perfectly, I shape the environment; it doesn’t require me to adapt, just to float.
It might not be comfortable at first, but I just have to keep showing up — dripping, floating, writing anyway.
Little flashbacks from my emotional hard drive. This one starts with an Orkut password and a Bikini Kill song.
Double Dare Ya
DoubleDareYa30 was my Orkut password. To make it strong, I chose one of the hardest words I knew in English. It was the name of a song by Bikini Kill that I had to put in serious effort to understand.
Kathleen Hanna taught me not just a strange word (double sounded so weird to me), but also how to dare — and she gave me permission to be the most annoying teenager I could be. Unapologetically odd. From eyeliner to toes, I matched the feelings only teenagers can feel. You’re somehow revolted but too young to explain why. It could be heartbreak, racism, inequality, or maybe my best friend got grounded for a month after being caught drinking.
It all hurt my bowels deeply, and to pass the discomfort away, I used my daring passport to hate most people, school, nuns (though I loved a few), teachers, adults, and the city I lived in. In my defense, I went through the move-to-a-small-town-I-hated drama, and no glimmering vampire showed up to shake things up.
However, that town probably made me an introvert.
And possibly a writer.
Can’t hate it.
💖 Dare to dare! 💖