Panic on the streets of speechlessness

An intellectual challenge came up this week that of course I’ve unquestioningly lept on.
​(Sarah trying to punch above her weight again, making things hard for herself as she always does.)
By the end of the week, I’ll need to get my German back to where it was in my university days, where we were translating into and out of the language and marked with a harshness that still gives me a bit of angst every time I put a German word to paper. 
I remember the words of my German grammar teacher, Rainhild -- an absolute battleax of a tutor (but very much with her heart in the right place) as we broke up for the Christmas holidays:
“Tell all your friends, ‘I am sorry, we can’t spend very much time together. I am a student at Oxford and I have to study”. 
Of course I ignored her advice and spent my holidays in London trying to play catch up on the fun all my school friends had had at their universities. Life is about choices, as my mentor says. (This articulation is pretty binary, but): We either sit with our declension tables and verb lists for hours on end or we hang out with the tribe of misfits who adopted us in high school and led us by the hand through the city’s rave culture, one of whose mother is an artist and collector of dead objects and houses them in a museum in Crouch End which doubles up as a den for a bunch of teenagers who could do whatever they want, so long as they didn’t touch the dead lamb which potentially had been embalmed with arsenic. Very different from my home, of course, which was similarly chaotic but far less bohemian, where I’d had to dismantle the lock on my window and sit precariously on its ledge to smoke, and in which strange things like the instruction to “go up to your room and learn these 300 French words in the space of an hour and I’ll test you” would descend upon me apropos very little. Weird flex but OK. 
These friends were great of course, but sometimes they were a struggle to spend a lot of time with, and I’d regularly get comments about the disappearing acts I’d pull on them, too. Trying to integrate the two very different people I was at home and with them felt impossible somehow, like I had no core to fall into. That’s the challenge with us shape shifters, we’re too easily swept up by someone else’s dance and struggle to find our own rhythm. Makes it even harder to find time for those declension tables, doesn’t it?
So this week, I’ll return to the dance of proving myself in German, ask myself tough questions along the way. I’m kind of excited about it, to be honest. What is it that has hampered my progress in this area? Since my return from Hong Kong the language, at least the spoken part, has mostly come back. For sure I understand everything without hiccups, and I have fully functional friendships in German. Many Germans I know insist on only speaking English with me, so they can practice their language. I’m starting to push back a little, but I get lazy if I’m honest. 
The biggest hindrance is of course my ego. Words are my domain, I derive a lot of pride and joy for being the person who just always has the perfect word at the ready, delivered at the speed of a bullet train. In German I falter and grasp for the right ones, arrive at sort of next-best-thing verbal contortions that aren’t exactly what I mean, and cheat a lot by throwing around English words that I know are understood, and just have this serious mental block when it comes to putting words to paper.
I understand where this comes from. Speechlessness for me is still sometimes a fright, sitting close to the threat of powerlessness and a loss of agency. Something apt my (lovely) therapist pointed out a couple of months ago.
“You and your words. You find them so quickly it’s almost like you grab hold of them so that you don’t have to feel what they mean to you. It’s like, if you find the word for the type of tree you want to describe, and quickly note it down, you won’t take the time to witness how it moves, its smells, its colours, and all of that.” 

She has a point.