Expanding My Interests

As I grew and found myself entering high school, I felt drawn to some unexpected topics that I had never thought about. In my first year, I was placed into a higher level Spanish class with a few close friends. Up until this point I only ever thought about Spanish as being a requirement for school and left it at that. The teacher was from Spain and had education and fluency in a few other European languages, one of them being French. She also organised trips to go abroad for language and cultural experiences for students serious about learning a second language. I feel this was a catalyst that activated a higher level of curiosity, namely and surprisingly the French language. Although I had to study Spanish, I couldn’t ignore this new language. I became obsessed and had to reading everything on it. French was the catalyst into the rest of the world beyond America.

Another language experience happened again a year later when a friend from summer camp introduced me to the Russian language. However, this introduction not only ended up sending me to study linguistics in university, but it also opened a deep portal into a part of my spiritual self.

Since I was already in love with these two languages, I decided to travel further through the melodies of other foreign music on my own. The next three languages that really spoke to me were Norwegian, Danish, and Finnish. I feel that these three were the beginning of my intentional self-discovery.