ICWIB

Really… It does…

If you had told my thirteen-year-old self that I’d one day write a 1k something-word blog post in English—for fun, no less—I would have stared at you in absolute silence, mostly because I didn’t know enough English to tell you to get lost.

Back then, English wasn’t a “majestic language of global opportunity.” It was a daily, violent migraine. It was a massive, concrete wall standing directly between my peaceful life in the Philippines and the surreal, upside-down land of Australia.

Fast forward to today, and look at me. Here I am, typing fluently in the exact language that once caused me severe emotional damage. I survived! I conquered the beast!

…Except life has an incredibly twisted sense of humor. Because while I was busy upgrading my English, my brain quietly hit “Select All” and “Delete” on my own mother tongue.

Today, I am the ultimate linguistic paradox: a foreign-born Filipino who can understand Tagalog, but physically cannot speak or write it, living in Australia with an English vocabulary that is fantastic for casual banter, but completely useless in a corporate boardroom.

Grab a coffee. Here is the tragicomic story of how I traded one language for another, lost my voice, survived the headaches, and became a walking, talking translation error.

I was thirteen when my life was uprooted. In the Philippines, life was loud, tropical, and wonderfully straightforward. Everything was spoken in Tagalog. I had friends, I understood the jokes, and my brain operated at a smooth, stress-free 100% capacity.

Then came the airplane ride to Australia.

Moving across the planet as a teenager is already a special kind of torture, but my situation came with bonus features: I was moving to live with my mother and a new stepdad. So, while trying to digest the fact that I was suddenly living in a totally different hemisphere, I also had to navigate a completely new family dynamic at home.

And my mother and stepdad had one major, non-negotiable life goal for me: I had to learn English. Immediately. No excuses.

They didn’t just casually encourage me to practice. Oh no. They pushed me. They shoved me into the deep end of the English ocean with lead weights tied to my ankles.

At home? English time. At school? English time. In my sleep? Probably English nightmares. My brain felt like a tiny budget laptop trying to run 4K video editing software while overheating on a bedsheet.

If you’ve never tried to learn a complex foreign language while going through puberty in a foreign country, let me paint a picture for you: it is physical pain.

My Filipino accent wasn’t just “thick”—it was an impenetrable fortress. Every time I opened my mouth to speak, the words came out like heavy, awkward boulders. Simple, basic sentences felt like pulling teeth out of my own face with pliers.

I’d try to say something totally normal, and local Australians would give me that classic, overly polite, blank stare—the kind of look people give a toddler who is aggressively trying to explain a dream about a fire truck. They’d nod slowly, smile, and wait for me to finish straining.

I distinctly remember sitting in my room, staring at my homework, genuinely wanting to grab my own hair and pull it as hard as I possibly could just to distract myself from the throbbing headache in my skull.

Why is “cough” pronounced “coff”, but “dough” is pronounced “doe”, and “through” is “threw”? Who invented this language? Why was it allowed to happen?

When you can’t speak the language around you, your personality gets completely erased. I was witty in Tagalog! I had jokes! But in English, I was reduced to nodding, smiling, and praying nobody asked me a follow-up question.

You feel stupid, even when you know you aren’t. That constant isolation slowly spiraled into a deep, dark depression. I was homesick for my friends, homesick for my country, and utterly exhausted from having to translate every single thought through a filter of sheer panic.

Depression makes time move like cold honey, but somehow, without me noticing, the human brain did its creepy adaptive magic.

You don’t wake up one morning, stretch your arms, and yell, “Hooray! I’m fluent!” It’s much more insidious than that.

First, I realized I was getting jokes without having to translate them in my head first. Then, I stopped getting that dull, iron-band migraine behind my eyes during class. Then, I ordered food at a shop without having to mentally rehearse my order seventeen times in the queue like a crazy person.

Slowly, my thick accent smoothed out. The words stopped feeling like mouthfuls of marbles. I stopped reaching for my hair in sheer agony. I made friends. I learned Australian slang (which is basically just taking a real English word and slapping an “o” or an “ie” on the end of it).

Against all odds, I had won. I could speak English! I could write English! I could think in English!

Victory, right? Cue the inspirational movie music!

…Yeah, not so fast.

Fast forward a few years. I’m walking down the street, feeling pretty confident about my life. I survived the move, I survived the language, I’m an Australian resident now.

And then someone speaks to me in Tagalog.

My brain instantly hit a blue screen of death.

I stood there like a malfunctioning robot. I understood every single word they said to me. My brain processed the meaning effortlessly. But when I opened my mouth to reply? Nothing. Zip. Nada. Just the silent sound of wind blowing through an empty canyon.

While I was so busy cramming English nouns, verbs, and slang into my brain to survive high school, my internal hard drive ran out of storage space and silently uninstalled Tagalog.

So now, here is my absurd reality:

• Can I understand everyday Tagalog? Yes! If my relatives are gossiping at a family dinner, I catch 100% of the tea.

• Can I speak Tagalog back to them? Only if you count stuttering, making weird hand gestures, and replying in English as “speaking Tagalog.”

• Can I write it? Absolutely not. Don’t even test me.

• Can I understand advanced, formal Tagalog? Hahahahaha. No. Deep Tagalog sounds like ancient secret spellcasting to me at this point.

It is the ultimate plot twist. I moved to Australia terrified of losing my identity, fought like crazy, and ended up becoming a human radio receiver that can pick up the Tagalog signal, but can’t broadcast it back out. haha.

To make matters even funnier, let’s talk about my English skills.

Yes, I can write blog posts. Yes, I can chat for hours. Yes, I can write emails without spelling errors. But please, for the love of everything holy, do not put me in a corporate environment.

If you put me in an office where people unironically talk about “synergizing key deliverables,” “touching base offline,” or “leveraging our cross-functional bandwidth,” my brain will revert right back to its thirteen-year-old self. I will stare at you with the exact same blank, terrified expression I had when I first stepped off the plane in Sydney.

I speak conversational English. I speak “let’s grab a coffee and talk about how ridiculous life is” English. I do not speak “Corporate Drone fluent in PowerPoint.” And honestly? I’m completely fine with that.

Being an immigrant who lost their native tongue comes with some hilariously awkward moments.

Whenever I meet other Filipinos and tell them I was born in the Philippines and lived there until I was thirteen, their eyes light up. They instantly switch to full, rapid-fire Tagalog.

And then comes the inevitable, agonizing moment where I have to look them in the eye and say: “Ah… yeah, so… I totally understood what you just said, but I have to answer you in English because my brain doesn’t do the talking part anymore.” haha.

The looks of confusion I get are priceless. People look at me like I’m a broken toaster. How do you just forget how to speak your own language?

Honestly? I don’t know! Ask my neural pathways!

Sometimes I feel a tiny pinch of guilt about it. Society tells you that you’re supposed to hold onto your roots with a vice grip. But at the end of the day, I have to laugh. The thirteen-year-old kid who moved here was under insane pressure, dealing with a whole new family, hit with massive culture shock, and suffering through real depression.

My brain did what it had to do to survive. It sacrificed Tagalog grammar to make room for English survival skills. It was a messy, chaotic trade-off, but it got me through the storm.

If I could build a time machine and travel back to visit that miserable thirteen-year-old sitting in an Australian bedroom, tearing their hair out over an English grammar book, I’d pull up a chair.

I’d look at my younger self and say:

“Hey. Put your hands down. Leave your hair alone, you’re going to need it later.”

“I know your head hurts. I know you feel isolated, stupid, and miserable. I know you miss home so much it feels like a physical ache. But hang in there. In a few years, you’re going to master this stupid, overly complicated language. You’re going to use it to write stuff that people actually enjoy reading.”

“Granted, you’re going to lose your ability to speak Tagalog, you’ll never understand corporate speak, and you’ll still look awkward at family gatherings… but you’re going to make it. And best of all? The headaches actually stop.” haha.

To anyone out there currently struggling to adapt, learn a language, or just fit into a world that feels completely alien: give yourself a break. Your brain is doing its best. It might mess up the wiring along the way, and you might end up a little bit glitched like me—but as long as you can laugh about it, you’re doing just fine.

Well…Bye bye?