#and attending 3 hour church services held in languages i don’t understand | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

psqqa · 13 days

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the person behind me is having a whispered conversation with someone and their desk and my brain keeps trying to go down the path “oh no it’s because they’re talking about how much they hate me!” and i keep having to drag it back to the extremely obvious and fully rational “oh they’re trying not to disrupt anyone’s work, super appreciate them for that”.

like human brains are for real the dumbest, most terrified little animals in existence. calm the fuck down my dude our colleagues aren’t going to kick us out of the cave to fend for ourselves against the cold and sabre-tooth tigers.

#i don’t usually have that brand of anxiety anymore #and i’m not even feeling anxious now #it’s just my brain’s instinctive reaction #and i’m stopping it in its tracks going ‘girl…….’#that being said i’ve never understood people’s brains concluding that people speaking in a foreign language = they’re talking about you #maybe it’s because i spent most of my childhood as an immigrant speaking a foreign language #albeit one that is well understood by much of the local population #or maybe it’s because i’ve spent many many hours in the company of family members speaking languages i don’t understand #and attending 3 hour church services held in languages i don’t understand #but yeah #i always find it more comforting than anything #comforting in the way i find hearing children playing comforting #anyway the only time i’ve actually heard people talking about me in another language #is when local dutch kids would be talking shit about me and my friends speaking english together #we were all of us bilingual so we understood them of course #and always made sure to throw something out in dutch to each other as we left #so that the shit talkers knew that we had understood them #and knew just how dumb they sounded for it #(obvsly people could have in fact been talking about me in a foreign language at other times #and not understanding that language i wouldn’t have known about it #but i know from experience of having been the foreign language speaker that the odds are simply much higher #that people are in fact talking about chores or shopping lists or cousin x’s second child’s graduation or whatever)

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