One warm evening in March 2022, I ventured out of my apartment to go on a first date. At the time, busy with grad school, I was not keeping a diary, so most of what I remember from that night — and the ones that followed — comes from a handful of messages I sent to friends back home in Spain. Soon the guy I had met and I were seeing each other regularly, tilting between what I would call a relationship in Spanish and what some English speakers might term a situationship — a concept that, like dating itself, has no clear equivalent in my mother tongue.
After we first broke up a few months later, I decided it was time to write about him in a diary. I did it in English, his native language, the language we’d bonded through — my second language. While writing about him, I embraced English to convey some sense of meaning, of hope. “I wish we don’t end up as two polite strangers, scattered memories of another time,” I wrote in December 2022.
What began as a lovesick exercise became an opportunity to reflect on my broader reality in a way that I never could in Spanish, offering a new opportunity to rethink myself and my feelings.
Writing a diary in my second language, I came to learn, makes me an outside observer of my own emotions, providing a clarity that is lost in the proximity of my native tongue. During the pandemic, a diary in Spanish helped me fill the emptiness of time that seemed devoid of meaning, but looking back, I realize how much of what I wrote then was shaped by writing in a language too close to my heart to allow me to think clearly.
In January 2021, I wrote a long, unstructured passage in Spanish, full of phrases like “ese manto gris perenne que es el cielo de enero” (“ever-gray January sky”) and “hablas en pasado para tratar de poner un poco de distancia” (“you speak in the past tense to gain some distance”). The diary entry read as if it was rushed to the page unfiltered, straight from the brain. Writing a diary in English forced me to dig for precise words, slowing down my thinking and taming my thoughts.
Through English, navigating life’s concerns became more bearable, and what started as the only way to write about a relationship turned into a therapeutic practice of self-analysis. Last summer I was caught in an identity crisis: I felt emotionally stuck between A Coruña, my hometown, and Brooklyn, where I currently live. Neither place seemed to fully suit me, and writing about that despair in English gave me the space for deeper introspection. “Is it possible to feel settled somewhere,” I wrote, “when part of who you are depends on constantly leaving?” Detaching from the rawness of my native tongue, one that would otherwise make me spew out words in torrents, had finally helped me understand myself.
Ismael Ramos, a writer from my hometown, disagrees. He believes his work, much of which is intimate poetry, comes alive in his native Galician — a language related to Spanish and Portuguese that is also my father and grandmother’s native tongue. Decoupling his language from his experience is inherently challenging, especially while dealing with his emotions. “There is a language of your body,” Mr. Ramos told me. He is right: Writing in English feels unnatural, and it will never be as close to my heart as Spanish. Yet it is freeing because it is unnatural. In the blog I kept as a foreign exchange student at a high school in Lawrenceville, Ga., and in my college diaries when I lived in Madrid, I tried to make sense of my reality in the familiar passivity of my mother tongue. But such proximity fell short when it was time to analyze my feelings.
“You no longer see an impending possibility every time you look at him,” I wrote about my ex in my diary last April. “He is no longer a promise that feels as if it will never arrive.” Such phrases would never come naturally to me in Spanish, but switching to my second language serves as scaffolding, a structure that frees me from a linguistic mind-set that often just constrains the way I understand myself.
Other writers have embraced the practice of keeping a diary in a second or third language. Jhumpa Lahiri learned Italian as a way to find herself. “I don’t recognize the person who is writing in this diary,” she wrote a decade ago. “But I know that it’s the most genuine, most vulnerable part of me.” Curiously, I felt most candid while writing a diary in Spanish, exposed to a rhythm that has guided me since birth. Trying to make sense of myself through once foreign words carries a discomfort, but my English diary acts as a refuge from my frantic mind, a conscious journey into a language whose distance helps me unearth parts of my identity and understand them more deeply.
Writing in English gave me the clarity to articulate fears — anxiety about the future, worries about love. Keeping a diary in a foreign language is humbling, a process filled with mistakes that nevertheless allowed me to re-examine my identity from a renewed perspective, from afar. It clarified me to myself.
Alex Maroño Porto (@alexmaronho), a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, is an associate editor at The Atlantic. He is originally from A Coruña, Spain.
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