Sometimes I can't believe it I'm movin' past the feeling....life can always start up anew.

Sometimes it really weirds me out that I speak another language. And (brushing off the haters) that I speak it so well. I'm in the middle of typing a project outline for a community branding campaign that my water committee wants to undertake and I was looking at my notes from the meeting and trying to funnel it into the organized format of the project design and I was like, ''Shit! I know what I'm doing!''

Obviously just in terms of language, the actual project scares the bejeezus out of me because it's monstrous in size. I'm probably going to be the Debbie Downer and go to the next meeting with some pared down goals and a reduced number of objectives. But regardless of the project itself, the element that I can't help but focus on now is the language. I think as much as I want to think of myself as Tica (or, in past lives, as Bolivian and Ecuadorian), I'm still definitely from the United States. My character, my personality, my expressions and my ''way of be'' - while not unaffected by these stints living abroad - are still distinctly from the United States and shaped by the English language. So maybe it's not so weird that the days when I think completely in Spanish, when I laugh at the jokes that people make in another language and when I catch myself being so damn competent at speaking (these are actually quite rare, when I pull off an interaction in Spanish effortlessly, but are increasing in number)...I just feel like sometimes I get out of my own brain and end up asking myself, ''Whoa. Who are you?''

Ok so that sounds like multiple personalities floating around in there - not so, says I. I feel more staid and more even-keeled than I ever have when I've lived in foreign countries. I don't feel like I'm compromising myself for the sake of fitting in or getting along the way I might've done (might've done/definitely did) when I was 16 in Bolivia or with a bunch of friends from college in Ecuador. But it is disturbing every once in awhile to think that I didn't grow up with Spanish as a kid. How then, can it come so naturally now? Because I don't feel really that different, it's an illogical gut reaction to feel like a completely different person, someone who exists outside of all the experiences that I had growing up and living in Collegeville.

C'est la vie, right? We all grow up. We all become different people than we were when we were kids. Duh, and please excuse this banal revelation.  But it's maybe why I relate so much to music from Arcade Fire and MGMT. There's something real there in the music about feeling defined by the place where you grew up and defined by the decision to leave it. It used to be a feeling like, ''I can't wait to get out of here.'' And now it's like, ''It was only ever boring, not bad.'' Finding more in common with my parents and neighbors than I would have thought possible. So I don't know, maybe what I'm getting at is that when I operate in Spanish, I'm more prone to question myself (again...who the heck are you?) and it leads to more reflection not just about where I am now, but where I'm coming from, too.