Let’s be clear about one thing: I suck at languages. I am your typical 27-year-old American white dude: grew up in a single language household, didn’t try at Spanish AT ALL in school, went to college, got a job, and life went on in my monolingual world. Somewhere in there I fell in love with travelling and also realized the future is Spanglish.
The desire to speak Spanish crept into my head in my early twenties and grew stronger as time went on. When the pandemic hit in March of 2020 — about a year ago — I was living alone in the icy hellscape known as Chicago, newly single, and trying to figure out what to do with my quarantine boredom.