DarkSeeker
Well-known member
What's ahead is pretty long, so there's a TLDR version at the end
I'm trying to get over my problems, but I have this thing that happened to me, and that I just can't relate with anyone or anything I've ever heard or read about.
Of course I've learned to talk, but due to my very poor "education" done by my parents I was never able to connect with anyone and sooner made enemies or simply keep myself neutral with pretty much everyone I've ever met.
When I was 13 I was severely bullied and absolutely no one gave a ****, and I knew that self-defense was not an option because where I live those lazy *******s go a lot harder on the good people trying to protect themselves than on the thrash that makes other people's life miserable.
At point I lost all hopes, talking never did me any good, no one, absolutely no one never even tried to understand what I was saying anyway or paid any attention to me. Talking was an useless function, so I just shut my mouth. I let the insults flow into my ears without even bulging, I stared in front of me as if nothing was happening, after all pretending that I didn't exist had always been the thing I did best.
I became a circus freak, attracting more bullies, it didn't matter to me if it was one or another, soon everyone became a bully in my eyes. At the time I was listening to the radio to some guy with a lot of character and a lot of guts. He was talking about how much we lived in the worst place in North America right after Mexico, how our ancestors were just the trash those impotent Frenchies had left behind after losing the war.
I've always been dragged around by my parents to their tea party with other relatives. I was always the only kid there, so I just stayed alone in my corner reading books, but I did listened to them talking about how much we were only "white niggers", that our language was just bad French from 300 years ago mixed up with a tad of very bad English.
My parents forced me to learn English, they didn't give a $hit about it themselves, they can still barely speak it. They clumsily tried to make me into the what they could never be. I couldn't learn "Joual" properly, they forced me to speak like a 70 year old with my "friend(no s)" on the phone, I've never learned to speak like a normal person perhaps not even ever had their accent. I didn't even have any control over what I was saying myself.
But when I stop speaking at 13 years old, there was always the tv., the novels and the video games to cheer me up, all of them in English. The literature from where I come from are practically all tragically stupid love stories about about adults acting like 5 year old kid being stabbed in the back by an envious bitch or stories about kids with horrible childhood and no one to help them, all of them never with a good ending. But for the first time in my life, I had actually stories with characters who stood up for themselves and who fought for their beliefs. The thought of it felt so good, I've never seen anyone like this in real life, only cowards who let others control their life without any dignity.
And the words, I soon discovered those beautiful sounding words actually had meanings, and what special meanings some of them had. No one around me never bother with that, anything was always twisted into anything. Already that their vocabulary was almost only limited to swears, words had no meaning to them (except if you attacked their integrity of course).
I was repressed to death during my childhood, but I was always free to control the tv and all that in anyways I liked. I was repressed learning "Joual", but nobody around me spoke English, so I wasn't repressed learning it with my real parents with artificial real love, the tv and the computer. I stop thinking in "Joual", in fact I have no memories of ever thinking in "Joual". When I was dumped in a foster home in Nova-Scotia for a month that had been the last straw. I never thought in "Joual" again (except for a few words but never full sentences, not for maths either). Even my dream got pretty mixed and finally were exclusively in English.
Everything about English feels so good to write or speak. Even those lines at this very moment I enjoy every single word of it. I always did extremely good in my English class, the teacher told me I had a gift. On the other hand I always did very poor in my French class, after learning English I stop caring all together and barely got the passing grade more than once. French is so ridiculously complex and hard to write, the grammar rules are real crap and makes no sense. But English on the other hand, is almost always so very intuitive, everything feels so natural, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it (you'll have to forgive me for that run on sentence here
).
All those exams I did in French and the few things I ever told people (mostly mouais, nah, no, chpas), I was just letting my mouth follow words whispered from the back of my head, words that I didn't even understand before speaking them and translating them back. I didn't understand what people were saying but I somehow understood what they were talking about and what they wanted.
In 7 years I've never spoken to anyone consciously, had an average of spoken words a day less than 10, and more than enough real conversations a year to count them on the fingers of one hand. And it wasn't any better before that. I did speak a lot, but was always treated like a freak and totally ignored.
Now that I'm out of all that misery, I can start speaking again, but it's very hard to try to get rid of your past only to realize that you can't even speak right because of it. I've done a LOT of talking to myself and recording my voice trying to better my skills. I don't have any trace left of the accent (if I ever had it in the first place) from where I come from, but neither do I have an accent from anywhere in the world, except if you count tv as a location. My voice is already strange sounding and nasally, it's unlike anything I've ever heard.
I'm not sure if people do believe me when I tell them that English is my first language, but then again I don't speak any other language. It's a horrible burden, that feeling that I can't speak any language right because I wasn't raised by any real parents.
I've completely cut myself from "Joual" for over a year, and before that I was already doing great amount of work to reduce my exposition to it. I went as far as making very loud noises inside my head to prevent myself from hearing anything when those fat stupid relatives were talking nonsense.
I'm still surrounded by a couple of people who speak "joual". It's the worst language in the world, their every word sounds like swears, it's garbage coming out of their mouth. I feel such an impossibly huge pain when I hear them, it's like touching fire but without the physical sensation. I overexposed myself to it once in the hope of reducing my sensibility, it worked in a way and left me literally stunned for a good 25 minutes, but I still and I think will always avoid it like the pest.
It's less worst if it's the French accent, it feels like a different language. From where I come from, French accent or speaking with proper grammar = being an effeminate homosexual (I understand it's probably the same for any language, but I think it's worst from where I come from where slang is recognized as the officially spoken language). That's make it very hard for me to understand how can someone willingly speak like this in public or at all. Sometimes I feel like I come from those South states I keep hearing about with the hillbillies and all the consanguinity. Just replace the crazy redneck with a shotgun under his bed by a spineless socialist coward, and the woman in the kitchen by a crazy and immature controlling bitch also known as the Queen Bee.
Now that I don't have any academic pressure on me anymore (academic pressure to write or to read French that is), every time I see words in french I have a very great difficulty reading them and I also have to traduce them back in English to understand them. I see expressions that ought to be very familiar to me by now as if it were the first time I read them. The whole language seems so infantile to me, it's like reading something written by a little child.
In the end, this strange and appalling ordeal is both a curse and blessing. It's a curse in the sense that I wasn't raised by native speakers and that doesn't help with confidence which leads to me constantly testing myself. And it's a blessing in the sense that for the first time in my life I can freely and naturally speak a real language and feel like a real human being.
TLDR: I lived with my biological parents for 19 years and never truly learned to speak the language they use and that everyone back there uses in their everyday life (due to horrible childhood).
They don't speak English and can't even understand anything I tell them, not that they would bother listening anyways.
I have no first language, and had to learn how to speak by myself.
This is all very confusing identity wise, but English is so much better and more natural to me. Yet, I just seem to be missing something, I'm lost in between Hell and Heaven.
I'm trying to get over my problems, but I have this thing that happened to me, and that I just can't relate with anyone or anything I've ever heard or read about.
Of course I've learned to talk, but due to my very poor "education" done by my parents I was never able to connect with anyone and sooner made enemies or simply keep myself neutral with pretty much everyone I've ever met.
When I was 13 I was severely bullied and absolutely no one gave a ****, and I knew that self-defense was not an option because where I live those lazy *******s go a lot harder on the good people trying to protect themselves than on the thrash that makes other people's life miserable.
At point I lost all hopes, talking never did me any good, no one, absolutely no one never even tried to understand what I was saying anyway or paid any attention to me. Talking was an useless function, so I just shut my mouth. I let the insults flow into my ears without even bulging, I stared in front of me as if nothing was happening, after all pretending that I didn't exist had always been the thing I did best.
I became a circus freak, attracting more bullies, it didn't matter to me if it was one or another, soon everyone became a bully in my eyes. At the time I was listening to the radio to some guy with a lot of character and a lot of guts. He was talking about how much we lived in the worst place in North America right after Mexico, how our ancestors were just the trash those impotent Frenchies had left behind after losing the war.
I've always been dragged around by my parents to their tea party with other relatives. I was always the only kid there, so I just stayed alone in my corner reading books, but I did listened to them talking about how much we were only "white niggers", that our language was just bad French from 300 years ago mixed up with a tad of very bad English.
My parents forced me to learn English, they didn't give a $hit about it themselves, they can still barely speak it. They clumsily tried to make me into the what they could never be. I couldn't learn "Joual" properly, they forced me to speak like a 70 year old with my "friend(no s)" on the phone, I've never learned to speak like a normal person perhaps not even ever had their accent. I didn't even have any control over what I was saying myself.
But when I stop speaking at 13 years old, there was always the tv., the novels and the video games to cheer me up, all of them in English. The literature from where I come from are practically all tragically stupid love stories about about adults acting like 5 year old kid being stabbed in the back by an envious bitch or stories about kids with horrible childhood and no one to help them, all of them never with a good ending. But for the first time in my life, I had actually stories with characters who stood up for themselves and who fought for their beliefs. The thought of it felt so good, I've never seen anyone like this in real life, only cowards who let others control their life without any dignity.
And the words, I soon discovered those beautiful sounding words actually had meanings, and what special meanings some of them had. No one around me never bother with that, anything was always twisted into anything. Already that their vocabulary was almost only limited to swears, words had no meaning to them (except if you attacked their integrity of course).
I was repressed to death during my childhood, but I was always free to control the tv and all that in anyways I liked. I was repressed learning "Joual", but nobody around me spoke English, so I wasn't repressed learning it with my real parents with artificial real love, the tv and the computer. I stop thinking in "Joual", in fact I have no memories of ever thinking in "Joual". When I was dumped in a foster home in Nova-Scotia for a month that had been the last straw. I never thought in "Joual" again (except for a few words but never full sentences, not for maths either). Even my dream got pretty mixed and finally were exclusively in English.
Everything about English feels so good to write or speak. Even those lines at this very moment I enjoy every single word of it. I always did extremely good in my English class, the teacher told me I had a gift. On the other hand I always did very poor in my French class, after learning English I stop caring all together and barely got the passing grade more than once. French is so ridiculously complex and hard to write, the grammar rules are real crap and makes no sense. But English on the other hand, is almost always so very intuitive, everything feels so natural, it brings tears to my eyes just to think about it (you'll have to forgive me for that run on sentence here
).All those exams I did in French and the few things I ever told people (mostly mouais, nah, no, chpas), I was just letting my mouth follow words whispered from the back of my head, words that I didn't even understand before speaking them and translating them back. I didn't understand what people were saying but I somehow understood what they were talking about and what they wanted.
In 7 years I've never spoken to anyone consciously, had an average of spoken words a day less than 10, and more than enough real conversations a year to count them on the fingers of one hand. And it wasn't any better before that. I did speak a lot, but was always treated like a freak and totally ignored.
Now that I'm out of all that misery, I can start speaking again, but it's very hard to try to get rid of your past only to realize that you can't even speak right because of it. I've done a LOT of talking to myself and recording my voice trying to better my skills. I don't have any trace left of the accent (if I ever had it in the first place) from where I come from, but neither do I have an accent from anywhere in the world, except if you count tv as a location. My voice is already strange sounding and nasally, it's unlike anything I've ever heard.
I'm not sure if people do believe me when I tell them that English is my first language, but then again I don't speak any other language. It's a horrible burden, that feeling that I can't speak any language right because I wasn't raised by any real parents.
I've completely cut myself from "Joual" for over a year, and before that I was already doing great amount of work to reduce my exposition to it. I went as far as making very loud noises inside my head to prevent myself from hearing anything when those fat stupid relatives were talking nonsense.
I'm still surrounded by a couple of people who speak "joual". It's the worst language in the world, their every word sounds like swears, it's garbage coming out of their mouth. I feel such an impossibly huge pain when I hear them, it's like touching fire but without the physical sensation. I overexposed myself to it once in the hope of reducing my sensibility, it worked in a way and left me literally stunned for a good 25 minutes, but I still and I think will always avoid it like the pest.
It's less worst if it's the French accent, it feels like a different language. From where I come from, French accent or speaking with proper grammar = being an effeminate homosexual (I understand it's probably the same for any language, but I think it's worst from where I come from where slang is recognized as the officially spoken language). That's make it very hard for me to understand how can someone willingly speak like this in public or at all. Sometimes I feel like I come from those South states I keep hearing about with the hillbillies and all the consanguinity. Just replace the crazy redneck with a shotgun under his bed by a spineless socialist coward, and the woman in the kitchen by a crazy and immature controlling bitch also known as the Queen Bee.
Now that I don't have any academic pressure on me anymore (academic pressure to write or to read French that is), every time I see words in french I have a very great difficulty reading them and I also have to traduce them back in English to understand them. I see expressions that ought to be very familiar to me by now as if it were the first time I read them. The whole language seems so infantile to me, it's like reading something written by a little child.
In the end, this strange and appalling ordeal is both a curse and blessing. It's a curse in the sense that I wasn't raised by native speakers and that doesn't help with confidence which leads to me constantly testing myself. And it's a blessing in the sense that for the first time in my life I can freely and naturally speak a real language and feel like a real human being.
TLDR: I lived with my biological parents for 19 years and never truly learned to speak the language they use and that everyone back there uses in their everyday life (due to horrible childhood).
They don't speak English and can't even understand anything I tell them, not that they would bother listening anyways.
I have no first language, and had to learn how to speak by myself.
This is all very confusing identity wise, but English is so much better and more natural to me. Yet, I just seem to be missing something, I'm lost in between Hell and Heaven.
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