I feel like I have infinite layers of tape covering my mouth. And every time I try to take one layer off it is always another layer that prevents me from speaking. The thing is that I don’t know who puts the next layer of tape on my mouth. Is it my panic, my ​indecision, or the language barrier why I can’t talk even if I want to? I felt like someone had stolen my voice. 

Panic is such an essential thing for animal survival. Am I in danger? The short answer is no but this feeling makes me feel like I’m being eaten alive. It’s eating from the inside. It felt like the panic had already eaten too much of me that has become another person inside me. Every time is less of me and the only thing that is left is what the panic has made of me. I try to escape from something that is already inside me. At some point, I have become the prey of my fear. How something that small has become one of the things that have such a huge impact on me. It’s like trying to escape from the dark but the dark is a thousand and one times faster than me.

My Indecision. Choices everything is about choices. From the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep. It’s that thing that leaves my mind blank. Emptiness, what can I say when there’s not a single thing I can say.  When the indecision arrives my thoughts escape like scared birds. They fly away as fast as they can and hide in a place where I haven’t had the pleasure to meet yet. Leaving my mind and my voice full of nothing more than the memory that something was there. 

The language barrier is something that has absorbed me from the moment I set foot in this country. From the first, sorry, I didn’t understand you, you can repeat it to me again. I’ve been trapped in a soundproof glass jar. I can see what’s going on around me but when I try to speak no one can hear me. I have had to take shelter in the arms of silence and the long paths of the words that one day I wish to say. I feel like I’m split between who I am and what I can say. Every time I speak, it feels like there are so many meters of distance between me and the person with whom I am trying to communicate. We are so close and so far apart at the same time.

Everything in this world comes to a resolution. I have learned to live with my good friend panic, now I understand it’s intentions and reasons. My biggest insecurities have become my biggest strengths. And finally, after all, I can come out of the jar of language barrier and embrace enthusiastically. At last I was able to thank the lyrics and the silence that understood me like no one else has. And with their help I am writing this. At last, I think I have recovered a part of my voice to be heard.