No one tells you that being bilingual sometimes feels like standing in a doorway. Not fully inside one room, not completely outside the other. You belong to both, but never in the same way at the same time.
People talk about bilingualism like it’s a finished product. A skill neatly packaged. But in reality, they are uneven. One arrives faster. One hesitates. One feels emotional. The other feels precise. They take turns leading, depending on where you are and who you’re with.
No one tells you about the forgetting. About reaching for a word you know exists and finding only its shadow. About mixing languages mid-sentence, not because you’re confused, but because your mind moved faster than your mouth could keep up.
Sometimes it feels like loss. Like never sounding quite as sharp, quite as whole as you do in your first language. Other times, it feels like expansion. Like having extra ways to feel, to think, to understand.
Being bilingual is not about mastery

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