Mother Tongue?

I'm feeling better, not good but better. Still don't know what it was that made me feel like this.. HA..I just looked out of the window and it's raining, there you go..
Despite the pain, I actually studied while I was at work. It's a lot better than just sitting there feeling the pain. My midterms are soon and the 3rd round of exams from last semester, so I have to start studying anyway.

Now to something else. Did you ever ask yourself why I'm writing my blog in English? My mother tongue is German and I live in Austria meaning I should speak more German than any other language. I have difficulties expressing myself in German. It happens so often that I search a German word and I can only think of a word in English or Spanish. Most of my thoughts are in English and only some in German. My nightmares are mostly in German, good dreams are in English or Spanish.

I express my feelings in English. I wouldn't say 'Ich liebe dich' ('I love you' in German) to C, because there are no feelings connected to the words. Amazing how the same expressions in different languages can carry such a different amount of emotions. An 'I love you' comes directly from my heart carrying lot's of emotion, whereas 'Ich liebe dich' is just words for me. It's the same then saying 'My pen is blue'- that probably even carries more emotion when your favorite colour is blue.

So where does that come from?

I never heard 'Ich liebe dich' from anyone. I knew people say that to each other, but I didn't know how you feel saying that. Or what you should feel in order to say it. Then there is the fact that you are expected to love your family. So for me the word 'Liebe' ('Love') automatically had a negative connotation. I hardly spoke until I was 15, what also explains the fact that I don't speak my own dialect - I should speak Schwäbisch, the south German dialect (horrible one by the way :)). There were times I didn't even understand my parents, because they both grew up in that region and speak in a very thick dialect.

The situations in which I used German, were limited to informative ones. In school, with doctors and superficial friends. When I got older and the time of mobile phones and SMS came, people started to write set phrases at the end of messages to friends or family members, something that you don't really say to a person saying good bye after meeting them. In German that was a 'Hab dich lieb', what means as much as 'I like you'. It's a bit difficult to define that one, because it is less than 'I love you' but more than 'I like you'.. Anyway so suddenly I was confronted with this messages and started beating myself up because I felt that I should write it back, but I couldn't. It was incredibly hard for me to even write a HDL (the short form) at the end of a message. Because of what it meant and because of what message it would send to the person receiving it. With friends it was a feeling of vulnerability and with my sister (I never send anything like this to my parents) it just felt wrong. So after a while I became kind of detached to the words. They lost their for me anyway alien meaning. Writing HDL to my sister or friends was like a filler word like 'like' or 'you know'.

Of course this was a method for me to protect myself then, but like this I never developped a real emotion to the words.

Another thing is that I never spoke of my real emotions, not until I went to work in Guatemala. There I was the only German for a time so I was forced to communicate in English or Spanish. There I met the first friends I was able to trust enough to tell them about myself. So you can say that I actually lack the practice to express my feelings in German. With which words do you do that?
Well one thing I learned is to express negative emotions in German, as I was always surrounded by fighting family members. So my German cursing is fine :). I can do that one..

Thus, I have absolutely no idea how to express positive emotions, suppressed emotions or anger (in a not cursing way) in German. I have difficulties finding words in therapy, sometimes I even feel like I am translating the emotions I feel and think about in English into German for my therapist to understand them. Maybe that's also a reason why it is easier for me to feel my emotions alone at home than in therapy.. I'm just too busy translating them there.