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First time being seen

When I arrived in Toronto, I tried different things. One that felt courageous back then was applying for the front desk position at the pilates studio I often went to. I erased my experience as a senior machine learning engineer from my resume, and carefully pitched my communication skills and passion to the cofounder after her class one day. In the end, I didn’t get it, and honestly, I wasn’t sure I could have handled it anyway.

I think part of that gap was my English. I never felt confident about my English, even after living in the US for almost a decade.

Before I left, I went to say goodbye to him. That day, we talked a little outside our usual topics, about places we found interesting. I loved conversations like these, but I wasn’t confident navigating them. My world, I had to admit, was pretty narrow.

As he spoke in more and more complex, sophisticated language, I felt the fear rise. I made the choice to close the conversation myself, even though I liked it. “That’s nice, that’s great to know. Now I want to talk about my work.”

Yet, for a long time afterward, I kept going back to that moment, because I think it was a moment that changed me.

I came to realize that he saw me as someone bigger than I could see myself. It was never about my English, or being an immigrant, a software engineer, someone with an accent. It was about the cage I built to stay safe, making myself small enough to fit inside.

He never said it. He never even answered my questions: Is my English good enough? Is it getting better? He just kept speaking to me as if I belonged, and in that, he let me see it myself: I was already complete.