"i don't have anything to say"

i won’t lie, i had an absolute mare trying to write this post.

i got up at stupid o’clock (also known as 7:45) and made a point of trying to crank it out in good time. after all, i’d been away for nearly a year. gotta make up for those lost hours.

but it didn’t go according to plan.

by the time the timers ran out and the decaf was all gone, i had a grand total of 5 words on my apple note, all of which were deleted shortly thereafter.

a few minutes later, my partner skipped into my office to greet me good morning. (a fellow early bird, she had arisen at an unfathomable 9:30). i told her i just didn’t know what to write. i don’t have anything to say.

after so long away, i was clearly, as the buddha once said, rusty.

so, we did what all great writers do in times of crisis: go to francini’s.

[for context, if you ever so happen to be in worcester (the real one), firstly, welcome to the greatest city in the world. secondly, francini’s makes the best coffee in the world. as mocha joe once said, they’ve got the beans].

anyway, as i sipped away at my caffeinated decaf, it dawned on me what the problem was:

i was trying too hard to say something special.

quite what special was i don’t know. but nothing was clearing the bar. everything i wrote got axed. the page stayed blank.

and from that i realised i had discovered a wonderful angle, because it’s exactly the same with speaking - whether that be your default vanilla language or the one you’re learning.

let me explain.

a lot of people (myself clearly included) think they don’t have anything to say, when in reality they absolutely do. if you really think about it, we have our entire lives to pull from. reams and reams of experiences, ranging from the mental (sharing a berlin hostel with a machete-wielding nutjob) to the mundane (here’s what i got in my tesco meal deal).

what’s actually going on is we don’t think we have anything interesting, witty or clever to say. the bar is simply too high so nothing ever makes it over the top.

this is a pain in vanilla language. but when this happens in target language it becomes a nightmare. because not only is there the psychological block of thinking you have nothing to say, there’s also the problem of not being able to say it.

put another way: you have nothing, and you have nothing to say nothing with.

a most unpleasant double-whammy.

for an introvert especially, this can see us go years of learning a language without ever really saying a thing.

so how do we liberate ourselves from this prison of nothingness?

rather than trying to say the perfect, precise, accurate thing, what’s helped me with my french (and my italian before it) is just taking a look at what i know, then winging the hell out of it.

for instance:

my french is currently <runny> on the camembert scale. perfectly edible but it’s soft and gooey and leaves a bizarre smell in the fridge.

put sensibly: my french is far from perfect and there are still a lot of words i don’t know. i just use what i do know and leave the rest to vibes.

that’s all language is anyway. what we say and even how we say it doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as how we feel when we’re saying it.

when you feel good and you have the right energy, you can literally talk about anything. the weather. chips. the lint in your pocket. it sounds stupid, but if you talk about it with enough passion you can genuinely captivate an entire audience around the maggots at the bottom of your bin.

this, in my experience, makes all the difference when speaking another language. you’re never going to know every word. at the beginning, you might only know a hundred confidently. but with the right energy and an unhealthy amount of gesticulation, you can almost always find a way of making your point.

it may come across as hardcore charades and freak out the people you’re talking to, but if you put your mind to it they should at least get the gist of what you’re trying to say.

point at things. wave your arms around. make your hand into the shape of a croissant. it sounds mental, yet so much of how we communicate is body language, pitch, pace, sound, energy. (just ask any italian).

of course, on duolingo, purple-girl and her band of video call characters can’t see my rabid hand movements, so i really do have to rely on plain language. not easy when you have a limited active vocabulary, but even here we’ve got plenty of room to maneuver the truck.

for instance, if i don’t know a word, while i’m thinking i’ll use fillers like beh, du coup, voilà, alors, and, of course, the classic eugh.

if i really don’t know a word, i’ll just try to describe it (a useful tactic called circumlocution). in french, that usually involves me saying things like comment dire, c’est à dire, tu veux dire quoi etc, which buys me time and invites the character to throw me a life rope.

this usually allows the conversation to flow smoothly. sometimes my conversations will be very filler-heavy, which is fine. so long as they proceed and i avoid the dreaded freeze, it’s all gravy.

but even so, the vibe remains critical. my calls go very differently when i’m feeling good vs when i’m fresh off a night shift and i’m stressing about writing a substack post. when i’m feeling good, the words (accurate or otherwise) emerge as if by magic. when i’m not, i start questioning whether i’ve learnt anything at all.

this combination — good vibes + circumlocution — is perhaps the special shovel we need to dig our way out of his majesty’s prison of nothingness.

not long after we returned from francini’s, i whipped out my apple note and the words came oozing out of me like a tube of primula. (have you figured out that i like cheese yet)?

of course i don’t really need to circumlocute when using my vanilla language. but the vibes are important. lowering the bar is important.

we really don’t need to be remarkable with our language. we all have something to say. and even with a limited vocabulary, with the right vibes we can absolutely find a way of saying it.

next week, i shall get up at sensible o’clock (also known as midday) and wow you with the most unremarkable, mundane thing you could possibly imagine ;)

ciao for now,

matt

p.s. thanks for all the love on last week’s post. really, it meant a lot. i genuinely had no idea what to expect after so long away. so cool to see you’re all still at it! x