A CLOSED LOOP
PICTURES IN ROOMS
FIELD WORK
ARRIVE BY MAGIC
2021/11/16
A few days ago I had a dream where I found myself in an English Competition. It was held in a spacious auditorium, and I was sitting amongst my old classmates and teacher. When the stage called for its first contestant my teacher threw my name out. Feeling massively unprepared, I walked up stage and into the spotlight. The air around me froze. I squinted my eyes and made out a few faces, cold and stern, hovering over the judges panel like apparitions. While adjusting the mic, I tried to crack a joke to break the awkward silence and gear up for the speech. I was clearly trying to get on the judges' good side.
Cut to some time before or after the competition, the judges, who were all white, presumably expats from English speaking countries gathered and began to chitchat. Somehow their state of total relaxation irritated me, who took the competition incredibly seriously and had suffered through significant stage fright. It was embarrassing that I tried ingratiate myself to someone who, speculatively, could not have cared less.
The reason why this dream stayed with me is complicated. Ultimately, I think it boils down to my questioning of who those judges were other than some native English speakers. The fact that the knowledge of English welds such authority, especially magnified in the format of a language competition must have been bewildering to a younger me, who had little idea that he would soon be spending many years in the US. Only when trying to recount the sequence of event did I realized how ordinary the dream really was. It’s an anxiety dream modeled from a high stress situation that I experienced as a teenager, nonetheless it provoked a discomfort that's rooted in an imbalance of power regarding the usage of language that somehow still rings true for me today.
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Cut to some time before or after the competition, the judges, who were all white, presumably expats from English speaking countries gathered and began to chitchat. Somehow their state of total relaxation irritated me, who took the competition incredibly seriously and had suffered through significant stage fright. It was embarrassing that I tried ingratiate myself to someone who, speculatively, could not have cared less.
The reason why this dream stayed with me is complicated. Ultimately, I think it boils down to my questioning of who those judges were other than some native English speakers. The fact that the knowledge of English welds such authority, especially magnified in the format of a language competition must have been bewildering to a younger me, who had little idea that he would soon be spending many years in the US. Only when trying to recount the sequence of event did I realized how ordinary the dream really was. It’s an anxiety dream modeled from a high stress situation that I experienced as a teenager, nonetheless it provoked a discomfort that's rooted in an imbalance of power regarding the usage of language that somehow still rings true for me today.
