Looking Out To Sea

I remember back in school, I took part in a school exchange with pen pals from a school in France. They came over to Scotland for some time, and we went back there a few months later.

When my pen pal visited us, I learned a lot of French. I’ve probably been more fluent at other times, but I’ve certainly never been more immersed in a foreign language. It was quite terrifying. I would talk to myself in French. I dreamed in French. I even counted in French. It was terrifying because I began to realise (a) how much I talked to myself and (b) how much of an obstruction not knowing the word for something can be, even when talking to myself.

The same thing is happening when I go to sign language classes. I leave class with my head spinning and have to refrain from gesticulating wildly at every passing person or thing. I can’t go past shop signs or street names without fingerspelling them or describing them, or at least thinking how I would describe them.

It was slightly easier when it was a Saturday morning class because by the end of the day I would normally have exhausted my signing fever and could sleep soundly. But last night it took me hours to nod off. It really was like a fever, where you toss and turn and the silliest things spin round your head for hours. And the lack of vocabulary would stall me all the time, as I rehearsed BSL phrases in my head. Then I would have to re-work what I wanted to say using the concepts I knew, and start again. It was infuriating and almost painful.