Life as a Trilingual

“I speak three languages, yet no one understands me.” This sentence circulated widely on TikTok, often delivered with irony, and its weight softened by humor. Yet, resonated with me in a way I struggle to articulate. I am fluent in English and French, and Arabic is my mother tongue, the language that shaped my earliest thoughts. Still, I find myself unable to inhabit it when it comes to expressing my emotions. Speaking my feelings in Arabic feels unnatural, almost intrusive, as though I am violating its sanctity, its inherited beauty, its intimacy, its comfort. I have quietly ruled it out as a vessel for vulnerability.

Then there is French, so often romanticized as the language of love. Ironically, I have found it to be a language practiced in restraint. Its native speakers, in my experience, often favor solitude over communion, introspection over shared emotional landscapes. It allows me to describe feelings exquisitely, yet never to surrender to them fully.

Finally, there is English, the language I am using now: the language of my books, my television shows, my inner monologues. It is the medium through which so many of us have learned to connect across borders and build a shared cultural vocabulary. English has given me access, proximity, and articulation. And yet, even here, something remains lost. English excels at clarity, but often at the expense of depth. My emotions arrive carrying the residue of other languages: untranslatable idioms, inherited silences, and meanings that refuse to settle neatly into English equivalents. What I express is always an approximation, never the original. And so, despite speaking three languages fluently, I exist in the quiet in-between: articulate, but perpetually misunderstood.