Who Am I / Wer bin ich?

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Hi, I’m Rae Lynn Minke. I’m an almost-40-year-old Canadian expat and ex-teacher, living in Germany with my little international family.

If you were to ask me about myself, I would tell you that I’m fun-loving, confident, and extroverted. I’d tell you that I’m a real people-person, and that I love talking to strangers at parties, and working on big collaborative projects at work, and performing at open mic nights. I’d tell you I can usually be found playing some sort of sport with some sort of ball alongside a large group of my crazy, rowdy teammates and friends.

I’d tell you this about me, because this is the version of myself that I know the best… the version of myself that I grew up with, and that I identify with the most. But let me come back to that...

I have been living abroad now for almost half of my adult life. For the majority of my 30s, I’ve lived and worked as an expat on one continent or another. My travels have taken me from Canada to Malaysia to Germany to Canada, and back to Germany again. In those years, I’ve made a lot of wonderful connections. I have forged brilliant life-long friendships, met and married my partner, and had a child together. I’ve moved across oceans more times than I care to remember, and navigated a Global Pandemic as a new wife and mom, far from my family.

My life (and location) has changed a LOT since I turned 30. I’ve had to adapt to new environments, and step outside of comfort zones, and start over from scratch, and find and grow communities. And many of the character traits I mentioned above have helped me do these things, time and time again…

But for the past few years, I have found myself - somehow - for the first time ever - navigating all of these challenges in a second language. And it’s been hard, to say the least.

I can’t just ‘be myself’ in my 2nd language. I don’t know how.

Although I have lived in Europe and South East Asia, and worked in international schools and communities around the world, I have done so predominantly in my mother tongue of English. So when we decided to move back to Germany in 2021, I thought the transition would be easier for me, as I had already lived in the country for 3 years. I was technically still on maternity leave with my son at the time, and planned on being able to slot right back into my old city and job and community when the time came.

But life happened, as it always does. Unexpected news shortly after we moved back to Germany led to more big life decisions, eventually resulting in us relocating once again - this time to a small, little city on the Baltic Coast.

In all fairness, I will say that my German has vastly improved since our last move. It had to. As my son (and his bilingual vocabulary) grows, so must mine. I am no longer enveloped in the English-speaking bubble that comes with working in an international school environment, and my city is not as English-friendly as the one I lived in for 3 years before this.

So there’s that. I’m bilingual now, albeit not fluent. Far from it, in fact.

And as the aforementioned fun-loving, confident, and extroverted person I’ve been for most of my life… I struggle daily with the inability to be my most authentic self in my second language.

I went from being the person who will speak to literally ANYONE, to the person who is intimidated by small talk; from the captain, the facilitator, the one who always volunteered to lead the group, to the one who prefers to stand in the background and observe, instead.

I’ve read that peoples’ personalities change in their 2nd or 3rd languages, and I believe it - without a doubt. Without fluency in a language, there isn’t the same ability to kid and joke around, or express yourself through tiny nuances or turns-of-phrase. When I want to contribute something deep or insightful to a conversation now, the best I can offer often feels superficial and surface-level. Sometimes, there are entire conversations happening in my head… but I can only manage to get half of it to come out of my mouth.

I’m an entirely different version of me here, and sometimes I really miss the old Rae. I liked her a lot. She was warmer, friendlier somehow. She didn’t always have all the answers, but she was confident enough to speak up and ask the questions without fear.

I know there is a very easy ‘solution’ to this problem. Get fluent. Just dedicate the time, put in the work, and the payoff will be worth the effort. We must learn to prioritise the important things in our lives.

…but have you ever just felt so overwhelmed by a task or a ‘should’, that you don’t even know where to begin?

I should make the time for it, I know. I should also exercise enough each week, find a new career/job that I’m passionate about, be a present and loving wife and mom, join new clubs, meet new friends, network, and… it’s just too much sometimes. It’s too many ‘shoulds’.

I have weeks where I manage to do some of the ‘shoulds’ pretty well. And then there are days where I feel like I’m just dropping responsibilities and proverbial ‘priority balls’ all over the place. Those are the days when being ‘conversational’ in my 2nd language has to be enough, no matter how inauthentic it makes me feel.

I truly hope 2025 is the year that I can start living a more authentic and vibrant version of myself again. My full self. Out loud, and in German.

And whatever your priorities or ‘shoulds’ are for this year - I wish you the same.

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