I could feel my cheeks slowly start to burn, betraying my humiliation with their bright red color. I was desperate and panicking, cursing myself for not being able to remember the word. How could I not remember the word? I couldn’t pretend it was at the tip of my tongue because, truthfully, it wasn’t even in the same country as my body.

Dreading the reaction, I interrupted my self-righteous tirade and said the word in an alternate language. Whatever progress I had made in the spirited debate around the dinner table was lost in the second I uttered a word in English. The faces before me expressed a combination of disappointment and disgust, unable to comprehend how a member of a family violently hispanic and masters of the Spanish tongue had betrayed them in such a way.

As a kid, my cultural affinity for English was never branded as malinchism because the habits I bred were thought to be positive. Whenever I chose to read literature in English, by either U.S. American or English writers, no one complained. Even when I read English translations of works in French, Italian or Chinese, I was never called Malinche. Teachers at my U.S. American school praised my ability to spew pages of decent writing and analysis of writers foreign to everything I knew. My parents were extremely proud of the way I spoke another language — the accentless way that words slid off my tongue. And I thrived on that praise, for my writing and for the way I spoke, a quasi-proficiency in U.S. American English.

And yet, to this day, there are certain sentiments I can only express in Spanish. I once tried to explain the different levels of affection that can be communicated in Spanish, the difference between “me gustas,” “te quiero” and “te amo” — and my stingy use of that last one. At one point in my life, a rigid line drew itself between what I expressed in Spanish and what I expressed in English, assigning everything emotional to the former and everything academic to the latter. The line translated itself from my writing into the way I spoke and acted. I was emotional and energetic whenever I spoke Spanish, cold and reserved in English. This separation was doomed from the start and a failed creative writing assignment marked the beginning of a mission to bridge this divide.

“Lacks emotion. Well-written but boring, fails to fulfill the creative part of the assignment.”

For a while I thought that comment on my essay was unnecessarily harsh; today, I absolutely love it. “Fails to fulfill the creative part of the assignment.”

Savor for a moment the delicious way that turned out, coupled with the label on top of the paper that clearly stated this was a creative writing assignment. That one comment has had a profound effect on me, forcing me to look at the way I divided thoughts by language and what a large and important part of my personality was lost in translation.

I threw myself into fixing the problem, nurturing my linguistic capabilities in Spanish and allowing emotion to seep into my English writing. I wrote academic texts in Spanish, reveling in the sheer amount of information I was allowed to put into one sentence and still be grammatically correct. I tried my hand at poetry in English, reading and writing, with considerably less success in the latter. I hung around people with whom I could transition seamlessly between English and Spanish, to practice expressing the same emotion and energy in English that I did in Spanish. I thought I had somewhat mastered the divide.

I was wrong.

Early into my second semester at NYU Abu Dhabi I received a comment with the same consequences as the failed creative writing assignment but infinitely nicer and not attached to a failing grade. It came in the form of an email from Professor Deepak Unnikrishnan, whose First Year Writing Seminar is part of my semester workload, who had surprised me by reading something I wrote for The Gazelle. He sent me comments on the piece, pointing out what had been lacking. He didn’t say it directly but essentially it came down to the same thing: it lacked emotion. I was disappointed to realize that I still had work to do.

I welcomed the comment and used it to inspire some much needed reflection on how I conducted myself at university. I noticed the difference between how I spoke to other Latinos and to everyone else. I was much louder in Spanish, a lot more outgoing and forward than in English.

Recently, I stopped by Professor Unnikrishnan’s office for an interview. I had a very different article in mind at the time. When he began talking, I completely forgot about the article and started paying attention to the way he spoke, noticing how his words and pauses had the gravity of a published author. He commented on his surprise at finding a uniformity in accents here at NYUAD, with our widely diverse population. He mourned the lost accents, the sacrifices made when learning a new language.

“You need to know what you’ve lost. And I think I know what I’ve lost and that’s the ability to speak like my father,” he said gravely.

I pondered that a lot. What had I lost when writing and speaking in English? I remembered the time when I won an award for an essay I had written, a while after the epiphany of my emotionless English and my overly emotional Spanish. It had been an experiment of sorts, written in English but tackled the way I would in Spanish, often with whole sections written in Spanish that then had to be translated. I was disproportionately proud of it and I wanted to share it with my grandfather, great connoisseur of poetry and literature. He asked me to translate it, so he could read my masterpiece. I was stumped one more time, unable to provide what he wanted, unable to reconcile the words in English to an equivalent work in Spanish. I had lost a great part of that connection with my grandfather, who loves to quote poetry and books, expecting a response.

I still have a long way to go before I’m comfortable negotiating peace treaties between the languages I speak. Currently I am working to shake off the idea that my personality has to override whatever language I am speaking, to express the same exact things I do in Spanish as I do in English. I’ve accepted that, to me, poetry is only true poetry in Spanish, in English it is clever manipulations of language. For now, I’ll express affection in Spanish and enjoy the levels it allows me to variate between — truly, it’s a luxury to be able to say “me cae bien” when asked if you like someone.

Professor Unnikrishnan left me with a valuable final comment, "Languages have personalities. These personalities matter, whether it's on the page or coming out of someone's mouth."