Córdoba Orange
Fear and Language Brain-Drain in the Streets of Spain
(The following is an older piece of writing. I lost my other account and put it here to preserve it. It has been unchanged to maintain it’s authenticity.)
Oct 17, 2018
El Chino
This is a story for anyone going to live abroad. It’s about fear, culture shock, and Oranges. Specifically, the huge orange trees that have decorated the town of Córdoba since they were planted there by the Khalifas in the 1500s to decorate their magical Mesquita. These giant orange spheres explode in color against the green branches you will find on every major Avenida. They were the first things I noticed as I stepped off my train from Madrid. Ready to spend the next three months of my life here. Ready for adventure.
As I walked from the station to my hotel I stopped into a chino to buy a snack. It’s hard to say if a chino is more like a convenience store or a warehouse, but wether you want a soda, school supplies, a costume for Carnival, or a toaster oven, they probably have it. These tiendas are almo st entirely run by Chinese immigrants. I started a conversation with the clerk in our mutual second language, and I asked him about the oranges outside. I wanted to eat one.
You can eat one, he told me, but you won’t like it. (Apparently they are far too sour.) With the arrogance of a child (and an equal level of Spanish fluency) I told him that I loved sour oranges. I had to make a vertical leap for one of the low hanging spheres just to get one, and I did. I tore into the rind with my teeth and took a bite of the giant mysterious orange.
El Ideal
Needless to say, it was disgusting. It tasted like a tide pod, chlorine, and tang — shaken not stirred. I wanted to spit it out, but I couldn’t do that in front of the shop owner. So unlike my pride, I swallowed the orange. I took one more small bite for good measure, smiled at him, gave him a buenas días, andwalked on. Dropping the orange as soon as I could.
I was happy I took the orange, though. That was why I was here after all. To take risks. It wasn’t like I needed any of the courses I was taking to graduate. This quarter was more of an existential victory lap — Not very unique, I know.
I wanted a different kind of education while in Spain. I didn’t want to just step out of my comfort zone, I wanted to obliterate my comfort zone. I wanted to leave no sign of it except something like the pulpy aftermath of the all the oranges that had been crushed by cars as they fell in the calles. I was here to take risks. Sometimes risk tastes like you are biting into a car battery. That’s just the nature of the game.
I had a set of romantic objectives laid out for myself. I wanted to learn more Spanish. But I didn’t intend to do this in an academic way. I wanted to live the language. I wanted to learn it in my body when I went out dancing. I wanted to learn it in my stomach as I tried all the new food food. I wanted to learn it in my soul as I constantly pushed myself out my shell and made deep and meaningful relationships with the Cordobes. And I did learn a lot, though not in the way that I expected. Because, while dance, food, and friends are wonderful teachers, they are not as effective as the three I ended up learning the most from: failure, embarrassment, regret.
And boy, was there a lot of failure, embarrassment, and regret. But I’ll save most of those stories for next time. This story is about my constant battle with fear as I lived my life Andalucia. How I often got exactly what I asked for. How all the opportunities I needed were falling in front of me as often as the oranges from the tree outside my window. And how, unlike my first day at the chino, I did not bite into them.
La Realidad
Here’s the thing about highs: they will always, always be followed by lows. It’s newtons third law of motion. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. But there were no apples to fall on my head like they did for Newton. In Córdoba there are only oranges. So I did what I normally do. Romanticize. Get way too excited, ride that eternal wave of possibility and hope, until the rainbow booster shooting out of my ass runs out of juice and I crash into a pit of despair.
And that’s where I found myself, one week after arriving in Spain: laying on my bed in that pit of despair. Staring at the orange tree in the park outside of my window, noticing how many oranges had fallen, thinking about how unfair it is that all beautiful things are doomed to die. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing with texts about the night before. I knew what they were about, but I was too depressed to answer. I had pushed too hard against the walls of my comfort zone, and now the walls were pushing back.
While I stared at the park outside, I looked at the little soccer field, terrified. Before I left I told myself that I would start playing soccer. Nothing serious, but as a way to meet more Spaniards. Also, I had read somewhere that playing team sports was a great way to learn a language spontaneously. As the excitement of the game overtakes you, you start yelling out phrases you didn’t even know you’d absorbed.
But then I thought about the last time I played soccer, when I was eight. I thought about our 0–13 season, and learning the hard way what it felt like to be the worst team in the league. I didn’t even get a participation trophy. And, as is common with my depression, the thoughts just snowballed from there. Soon I was scratching at every single emotional scar that team sports had left on me in my life. Years and years of telling myself that I will never be anything but a worthless klutz, all coming back to me in that moment. The speed of my thoughts were fiber-optic, but my body was catatonic. And I could not move. My phone kept buzzing with messages as I dreaded addressing what I was sure they were about.
Perspectivo
Before I tell you what those messages were about, I’d like to put somethings in perspective. First, I should say that if I am anything, I am too hard on myself. People often laugh at me when I try to tell them that I’m a shy person who struggles with depression, so I usually don’t tell them. Externally I am outgoing, I laugh and sing often, I walk up to strangers and start conversations. But that doesn’t change the fact that I have a deep dark voice inside of me, one that tells me terrible things about myself. I have learned how to live with this voice and not let it control me. But what I was learning as I tried to speak more and more Spanish, is the energy a second language drains from you. My foreign friends had mentioned this fatigue before, some of them even got migraines from it, but I could not have understood how real it was until living it.
So, while externally I still seemed extroverted, my defenses against that dark inner voice were being weakened by the second language. Often the dark voice won. I was calling them Siestas, but I knew they were depression naps, and they were becoming more frequent.
The second thing I should say is that any disappointment I have with my trip comes from how often I let that voice win, not with Spain itself. Spain is a beautiful country, and like any beautiful country it has a lot of problems. But this article isn’t about those problems. I consider my experiences in Spain, as well as the people I met there(from all over the world) to be very important in my life. This story is about culture shock, and the toll that learning a second language can have on your ability to be present and grateful. Maybe my other stories will explore all the adventures I had in Europe. But no adventure through Middle-earth is complete without a walk through Mordor. Depression was my Mordor. Learning a new language was the army of Orcs I had to battle every day. Fear was the ring of Sauron I carried with me, weighing me down.
Los Mensages
Every time I walk into a club I still have a bowl cut. There’s still pimples on my face, I’m eleven years old and every woman in there is busy rehearsing their “I love you as a friend” speech. I feel like a scared little boy at my first homecoming dance.
This is not the external vision most people see. They see a confident American dude going up to strangers and striking up conversations in a language he hasn’t mastered — and still making them laugh. They see him going out onto the dance floor, smiling and drinking. Dancing with strangers and friends alike. Perhaps it’s bad luck to give away the secret to my charisma on the internet but here we go: I am faking it.
At least three times that night I had to go to the bathroom to drunkenly wipe away my tears. Trying to snap myself back into it and overcome the wave of anxiety I get from huge groups of people, only to put a smile back on and go out there again. It felt like surfing, except with surfing, I was never this scared. I didn’t mind being smacked against the sand and nearly drowned by a rip-current in comparison to this. Fake it ‘till you make it I would tell myself. And I guess I eventually made it.
The club my classmates and I had found was called Gongora, named after the famed poet from Córdoba. It was Erasmus night, which meant international students got in free. For those uninformed, Erasmus is the far cheaper, far superior version to Study-Abroad for students in the EU. We arrived at the club at 1am, but it was entirely empty until 2am, when people from all over Europe started pouring in. Magdalena was among them, and she was beautiful.
I would later find out that she was the student ambassador for Erasmus in Córdoba. I would also later find out that she is in a very happy relationship. But at that moment I all I wanted was to dance with this beautiful stranger. So I pushed through the fear and the crowd, thought about oranges, and made it happen.
We danced the salsa for a while. I spun, turned, and dipped her. She was laughing and I felt amazing. When there was a lull in the music she held out her phone for me to type my number in. I was in, or so I thought. I tried to dance with her again but she pushed her German friend, Hella toward me and told us to dance. Then she disappeared through the crowd.
Fast-forward to the next morning. I’m hungover, frozen, and fighting with an inner voice meaner than Connor McGregor at weigh-in. You are so worthless, it keeps telling me, absolute garbage. But I pull through and I finally get the courage to pick up my phone:
Translation:
MAGDALENA: Chicos, I present to you Giovan from the U.S., Yesterday he was in Góngora giving it his all dancing salsa, so some of you know him.
HELLA: Giovan [do heart eyes need a translation?]
MAGDALENA: If you saw a dude last night with colored and brown eyes dancing salsa, salsa, salsa, it was him.
Matilde: Enchanted
MAGDALENA: If anyone wants to flirt with him, do it in a private message. First dates in Erasmus Cordoba, haha.
MATILTDE: .gif of Darren Criss fanning himself from arousal.
MAGDALENA: Here he who does not run flies [I don’t get the idiom???]
MATILDE: We already have a player on our hands.
I was getting everything I ever asked for. Here I had a group chat of 50 people applauding me for my courage, clearly interested in being my friends. But I couldn’t bring myself to reply. The Spanish felt too overwhelming at the time, and the confidence checks I was signing the night before were bouncing now, and bouncing hard. That voice kept telling me how I wouldn’t do anything but be a disappointment to these people, and like a dumbass I listened to that voice.
The messages continued to roll in about me for a moment, but then the subject changed and I feared I missed my window. Every day I got about twenty messages from that group chat, and not once did I reply.
Some boys had gathered in the soccer field outside my window to kick a ball around. I lay there like a lobotomy patient. Another orange fell from the tree.
No es Malo ni Bueno, Simplemente es.
I lost to fear once more, in a subtle way this time. My house mother had a son named Breo. He was much older than me but smiled with a youth that I don’t think I’ve ever possessed. He runs a cross-fit business called CODEN. He let me have a few free classes with him. They were incredibly hard, and intensely fun. We met at the park for a complicated circuit of running, jump-roping, push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups on trees, weight lifting, picking up giant tires and whipping rope. At the end of the day my body was wrecked. But I was getting strong and practicing my Spanish. After the free week I payed him for another week and I was already noticing results. But then the fear started to sink in again. Insidious this time, disguising itself as frugality. This time it was a fear that I couldn’t afford the class.
I wanted to travel to other countries after the term ended, and I feared I wouldn’t have enough money to take the class and travel. But I never sat down and did the math, I never considered how many cafe’s con leche I was buying every day that I didn’t need. I just decided. I can’t afford this, I said to myself, and the prophecy came true. So I quit the class, much to my current regret.
I was living with a scarcity mindset, always in fear that there wasn’t enough. As Robert T. Kiyosaki says in Rich Dad Poor Dad I was saying “I can’t afford this!” rather than asking “How can I afford this?” I was letting my fears about attention, achievement, and my finances stop me before I even started. It wasn’t until I started reading Kiyosaki, months after I’ve returned stateside, that I realized why pushing myself out of my comfort zone was so important to me in the first place:
…“if you’re the kind of person who has no guts, you just give up every time life pushes you. If you’re that kind of person , you’ll live all your life playing it safe, doing the right things, saving yourself for some event that never happens. Then you die a boring old man. You’ll have lots of friends who really like you because you were such a nice hardworking guy. But the truth is that you were terrified of taking risks. You really wanted to win, but the fear of losing was greater than the excitement of winning. Deep inside, you and only you will know you didn’t go for it. You chose to play it safe.
As I said, I can be too hard on myself. My trip to Spain was anything but a failure, and I pushed myself in ways I’ll describe in another article. But I wanted to write this down to be transparent with myself: I know I could have pushed harder. “Deep inside, you and only you will know you didn’t go for it.”
So, I am writing this so that anybody going abroad might ask “How can I afford this?” rather than being sure that they just can’t. I hope that some one reading this will free themselves from the crazy cycle of thinking that often stops us just before we reach our goals. I am not ungrateful for my time in Spain, but imagine how much better my Spanish would have been if I had just decided to participate in that group chat and practice with people my own age. Imagine how much easier my anxiety would have been to handle with the constant exercise that the cross-fit class offered, or even kicking the ball around with the neighborhood kids?
The logical person might say So what? So what you didn’t get everything you wanted, exactly as you pictured it? you got to live, dance, drink, and eat in a far away country for three months. Isn’t that enough?
And it is. It just seems like a damn shame that I had a soccer field with people who would have loved to play with me, staring me in the face every morning and night and I was too afraid to play. It’s a shame because playing with them would have forced me to think in Spanish, and it would have helped in all other fields. It’s a shame that I had a personal trainer and a friend that I snubbed out of a fear of being inadequate, that I tried to pass off as not having enough money. It’s a shame that I wanted to make non-American friends who challenged me, and I had them the entire time, but I would not approach.
On the last day of school I went for a walk through the park. I saw a city worker with a rake, cleaning a huge pile of oranges off the obstructed walkway. My time was up. The last orange had fallen.
