The Art of Communication: Navigating Identity, Language & Connection
Discover how curiosity overcomes self-image anxiety, why storytelling connects us across millennia, and the unexpected beauty of small talk.
Hello, lovely people. Today, I’m sharing with you a creative reflection on communication, some experiences I had on my journey of becoming my current self, the effect of speaking two languages on communication, the meaning of listening, how curiosity could help us to overcome overthinking about our self-images, how I connect storytelling skill to communication, small talks vs. deep talks, and lastly, nonverbal communication. I’m not a psychologist, and this is simply my authentic reflection. I like sharing the insights from my overlaps. And maybe it will help a few; who knows?
Just to make it easy for you to know what to expect throughout this essay, here are the subheaders:
Speaking Two Languages
Some Thoughts About Listening
The Words We Carry: Our Vocabulary
Self-image Anxiety vs. Curiosity
An underestimated skill: Telling a story
Small Talks
Nonverbal Communication
Hope you enjoy it!
1. Speaking Two Languages
Existing in two languages is, of course, the first thing that pops up for me when thinking about communication. Early 2000s. I was 10 or 11. We had visited one of my mum’s friends. The very first time that I was exposed to something that would change me forever, that caused me to learn English, that inspired me to get red balayage, but most importantly, made me decide to move to an English-speaking country one day and ideally become a singer, an actor, or at least something close to that: a Hilary Duff movie. And that’s how it all started.
I not only translate my words; I co-exist with two identities – English and Turkish. The other day, my husband showed me an English teacher who did a video, “If we were to speak Turkish as if native English speakers speak English,” and the literal translation made me laugh out loud and say, “True. That’s who they are. That’s who we are. That’s who I am when I speak English.” Fascinating thing, really. You can relate to me if you speak Estonian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, or Korean – we somewhat share similar grammar.
Just to give you a corrected Turkish version of a situation like this, so that you could get a similar understanding of how I feel seeing a literal translation of English to Turkish, here’s the literal translation of a Turkish person ordering at a restaurant as an example.
C: “Pardon! One can you look?” (“One” means “for a moment,” so the sentence means “Can you look for a moment?”)
The waiter looks at the customer, shakes his head, and shows “1” with his index finger, saying, “I’m coming! One second.”
W: “Yes, what would you want?”
C: “Is your chef doing the doner well?”
W: “Oooh, he makes the best doner here (meaning the town). If you ask me, I suggest iskender to my brother” (referring to the customer with “brother”).
C: “Okay, iskender exists by then.” (meaning let’s go with the iskender then, but we use the words “exist” and “non-exist” quite often due to the nature of the language. When it is translated into English, it gets deducted and takes another form.)
W: “Do you want meze and drinks?”
C: “Yes, two ayran (yogurt drink), and mix meze into the middle” (referring to various meze platters chosen by the waiter to be put in the middle of the table.)
W: “Of course, sir. Immediately coming.” (Referring to the platters - immediately coming.)
2. Some Thoughts About Listening
Socializing is an interesting thing, and I like observing myself while doing it. Sometimes I find myself thinking about my next sentences, especially when speaking in English, to make sure the sentence I’m constructing is grammatically error-free. Sometimes, I’m anxious and want to “wrap it up” before something weird happens. And sometimes I find myself quickly making up my mind about something, which then leads me to think maybe we’re terrified of not knowing what to think, what idea to have so that we want to have a result in our mind immediately. I also observe this in others, too. While having a conversation with a close friend a few weeks ago, she kept saying, “I can’t read, I can’t focus on anything because I have ADHD,” and I said, “ADHD could affect it, but maybe the sole reason for it may not be that?” Later on, the more we talked, we found that she actually doesn’t have a motivation to do anything about improving herself because she feels, “Why would I? I can’t do it anyway.”
Distinguishing between “Why would I?” and ADHD is, in my opinion, where the real conversation, the real communication, is happening.
We like labeling; we like the answers because, in that way, we feel secure. But maybe, if we dare to listen, if we dare to think more before speaking, it will be more satisfying because it will be in flow. We speak with a rush on autopilot mode and don’t allow our inner voice to get to the driver’s seat. We can’t wait to have the answers, walk the shortcuts; we miss the real conversation, the real chance to be heard and hear what others have to say.
3. The Words We Carry: Our Vocabulary
We can think in the scope of the thesaurus we have mentally. This represents two things for me:
The more I read or am exposed to new words, the wider my world gets.
Discovering the non-overlapping sections of both English and Turkish makes me excited because I exist in something that both native speakers of the language are not aware of unless they’re bilingual like me.
The word choice is also an interesting thing. Many people speak the same language, but the words they use daily are different. I don’t know why and how we choose our words, but it is like our DNA, our character. Even twins are not 100% the same, and there is something so humane about this difference in expression. The most obvious example of it is probably poems. By knowing a poet’s style, you could recognize their work among many other poems. And maybe the compellingness, the rhetoric, the rhythm of one’s elocution are attracting us.
I, personally, love putting an image in front of you when describing something. I like using metaphors, coming up with new phrases, directly translating Turkish sayings to English, and playing with imagery by interesting juxtapositions of words to create an effect. I’m not doing it by planning; it is something in me. I guess in that sense, we all have unique ways of expressing ourselves, using literary devices without knowing what we use.
At some point, I started this rhetoric course where different literary devices are explained thoroughly. I didn’t finish, but even from half-studying it, I learned a lot, so if you’re as curious as me for rhetoric, I highly recommend it.
4. Self-image Anxiety vs. Curiosity
I’ve recently stumbled upon Thee Book Club’s “Am I… Perceived?” essay and I highly relate to it. And it made me think one thing: I’m not feeling confident enough to share my Substack on my LinkedIn and some of my social circles because I do not want to be perceived there. Frankly, Substack is the social platform where I could find real people who really want to socialize, exchange ideas, and have deeper conversations. In this success-pursuing, competitive time we live in, I find my “day-job” persona and Substack persona conflicting, because writing about what I feel, what I contemplate about is not in capitalism’s favor.
I feel like, in order to be in many places with the fear of missing out, we split our identities more and more. Instagram persona, LinkedIn persona, lover persona, best friend persona, member of a cool group persona, family personas (sibling, parent, child etc.), boss persona, employee persona… As if the real-life identity splits were not enough, we now doubled down on the identities for our digital selves. Don’t get me wrong, I am so pleased with the opportunity of a reader from New Zealand who could read my essay with social media, but I can’t ignore the identity splits it caused within me. That’s why I quit Instagram because I couldn’t compartmentalize one more space in my brain for it; it wasn’t that valuable. We can’t and don’t have to be everywhere.
Another side effect of the social platforms’ effect on us is that it has messed up our understanding of our and others’ worth. We are acutely exposed to how we are seen, how we are perceived. Seeing the infinite reflections of ourselves as if we’re standing between two mirrors affects our communication. Funnily enough, now the other side of the planet is a few clicks away, but we’re lonelier than ever. The abundance of options is not something our brains are wired to survive in, and it shuts off – we end up not deciding. Not knowing our neighbors. Not investing emotionally in relationships. We are exposed to the peak of “happiest people” on social media. I’m afraid many of us started seeing people with something “more” as more valuable. Maybe it used to be only money, but now it’s fame, social status, and followers are also on the list. Saying, “People’s value, their worth can’t be reduced to how much success, money, and visibility they have,” is easy. But engraining it sincerely in our minds is hard because we are biased creatures. Our inner voices say, “If so many people follow this person, I should give them credit.” Or if someone gets a promotion or gets rich all of a sudden, our behavior towards them changes, which I find a bit funny. People don’t change with that. What they enjoy, what they laugh at, what they care about doesn’t change with that. We are still that unique person with some embellishments; that’s all.
Probably, we established communication rules among us adults, and some of them are useless. The way we perceive ourselves, the way we think others perceive us is, in my weird opinion, a way of keeping social things tidy until we die. But in my humble opinion, we should invest more in finding back that child spirit of curiosity towards others.
Rather than keep thinking about ourselves—how we are seen, what we wear, what we achieved, how much better we are than others—maybe we could just for a second, give the stage to the other party. Putting the spotlight on them in our minds.
5. An Underestimated Skill: Telling a Story
I often realize while writing, my thinking and puzzle-piecing of the stories I want to tell are improving. Story. An ancient way of connecting. I recently read The Epic of Gilgamesh, and it was quite an experience. Witnessing the way they spoke 5000 years ago was remarkable. Also, I felt a connection to my human being, my storyteller roots more when I saw, even 5000 years ago, our ancestors were telling stories to each other. It made me visualize them engraving these lines onto clay tablets. Getting to know their mythology, seeing the similarities between Prophet Noah from the Abrahamic religions and Gilgamesh’s Utnapishtim.
One lovely storytelling memory from my high schooler self. One time, we got bored of studying for university exams and started chatting with my friends in the classroom. One of us started to tell the guy she had a crush on. I don’t know what she told exactly, but at some point, I guess I said, “Do you want to know the future of you two?” and then started telling their future together, imagining everything and telling in tandem. All of my friends got excited by my imagination and were looking at me with wide eyes. I don’t remember the story I made up (I wish I had done so!), but I remember the feeling of making it adventurous, so much so that at some point our heroine of the story said, “And then what happened to me??” with excitement and bewilderment.
I remember that day because I did something unique – created a story based on my real friend. We laughed, we enjoyed it, we connected, we were young. (I know I’m still young, but not that much). Breaking the autopilot speaking cycles and telling a story is a great way to communicate.
Also, if you’re on Substack, I presume you are a writer, fiction or non-fiction. Everything written is a story, made-up or subjectively real. I’d like to challenge you to tell a story in another form to experiment with storytelling: writing something fiction for non-fictioners, and non-fiction for fictioners.
6. Small talks
I may define myself mostly as a deep-talker, but I also appreciate the beauty in small talk.
I wasn’t the most comfortable socializer, and still today, if you’d put me in a house with enough food, my hobby materials, and my husband, I can go on like that for weeks. I had so much prejudice towards myself, and I was mostly in my head – that was the obstacle between me and accepting other people inside my mental, circus-y, delusional, wooden treehouse. I used to plan what to say so much and try creating “safe conversation start to finish” without letting it flow, as if all conversations were the 2-minute elevator talk you’re having with a colleague or a neighbor, where the limited time pushes you to think “something quick to chat in a few sentences that the silence wouldn’t be weird.” I wasn’t in flow, and quite the opposite, I was swimming against the flow. I wasn’t looking forward to socializing events and drinks because they are so unpredictable, and I couldn’t embrace the unexpected, the unknown, back then. So it took a while for me to appreciate small talk.
Many observations and contemplations later, I started recovering from perfectionism. I couldn’t stand making mistakes. I was overanalyzing my social interactions and overthinking some normal conversations unnecessarily. One time, I was complaining, “Ah, this is such a stupid mistake! How could I do this?” and a wise man (my husband) said, “All mistakes are stupid.” What a relief; he was right, such a refreshing perspective.
I started seeing small talk as more enjoyable. The deep talks (I can talk about the meaning of life or the deep books I read for ten hours) were my safe zones. But my over-enthusiasm about the “meaning” and trying to find “meaning” in everything wasn’t serving in small talks because in small talks, you just talk and share a small moment with someone. And it is experimental, unpredictable, could be weird, or could be quite entertaining.
I think it is related to being okay with the unexpected and discomfort. I saw in a video that Dakota Johnson has zero bother with it. It kind of inspired me to see if I can stand silence. So I experimented with being silent on some occasions too, to see what’s going to happen. I highly recommend it; it is interesting.
Seeing small talk like an experiment rather than a performance helped me get to know more people out of my comfort zone. I love learning the lives of people; I love hearing real stories.
7. Nonverbal Communication
The eye contact, the way we use our hands, and the place where we look while speaking... If someone is tilting their head when listening to you, it means it means they tend to be great at making others feel seen. Crossing the arms means they’re not that comfortable. But all these things we read online should be interpreted in the context of the occasion. Nevertheless, I believe reading body language is a helpful communication tool.
As an observer, I want to share a few examples I’ve observed. I knew a person who was not carrying their body, their posture comfortably. Rather than embracing taking up some space with their existence, the way they walked and passed by people was anxious and in urgent desire to go back to their safe habitat, and sometimes apologetic. Of course, we can’t be 100% comfortable every day. But to me, it seems some people are stuck in that world they’ve created in their head. In contrast, another person I had observed was unapologetic, present, and confident. These two people, without saying anything, were signaling what kind of mental spaces they were living in.
I once had an interview for a position, and God, it was horrible. Because I didn’t know many “reading between the lines” rules of British culture. I was working with Italians before, and I unwisely assumed that what my Italian boss valued would be appreciated by other business leaders. That interview alone taught me so much about how to communicate verbally and nonverbally. Sometimes the best teachers are the worst experiences.
Facing our “room for improvement” is uncomfortable, but without doing so, no progress begins. After that interview I mentioned above, I reanalyzed many things about the way I communicate, and I changed pieces I didn’t like.
Overall, I continually observe myself and others to improve my communication. Although we think we are communicating, sometimes all we do is talk at, not talk with. My goal is to convey what I truly mean, and I love furthering my understanding of verbal and nonverbal cues to achieve that.
If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! Have you navigated multiple identities or languages in your communication? What’s your biggest takeaway or communication challenge? Share your reflections in the comments – let’s keep the conversation flowing!