When interacting with the material for this week, the one that struck me the most was Shaw's Incomunicado Video about the importance of connection through language. I personally found myself relating to every word she said about her experiences. All the questions she brought up about her identity when interacting with her grandparents and how she spoke about the challenges she faced, felt so familiar to my relationship to my grandparents. To hear how concerns about her surface level conversations with the people who should be some of her closest relatives transcended both ways was heartbreaking to me. It made me think about how the level of communication a person has can impacts their own identity even within their own family. I myself know my identity has not been shared by any means with my grandparents. They are limited to hearing about who I am through my parents who are able to have these deeper conversations with them. I myself however am not linguistically comfortable enough with Romanian to express anything about my identity that I am capable of expressing in English. This means vocabulary wise I find it difficult to share a lot of details about myself but also personality wise I don't know how to translate my humor for example or how to express my gratitude/affection in ways that I tend to do in English. What differs under my circumstances is my ability to understand Romanian, a language element that Shaw didn't have. But even with this ability I think my grandparents find it hard to connect with me by sharing their own personal stories because they are limited to the small portion of information and knowledge they have about who I am.
What I have noticed about myself and what we discussed in class about having a different identity in different languages has left me thinking about how I can begin to seek out my Romanian identity and truly interact with it. Similar to what Pedro shared in class, I found myself searching for this identity on social media platforms, especially instagram reels because to me discovering my humor identity in Romanian was the easiest first step. Yet it still feels like a weird balance because I am able to understand references and situations that feel distinctly Romanian but am not able to actively think of them myself because when at school I am not actively living in my Romanian headspace. I attribute this main barrier to the issue of working to be consistently immersed which is very hard to do when away from your language community.