When my bilingual 3-year-old gets excited, her thoughts outpace her brain’s ability to shape words into the right language, to the right parent. And she starts to stutter.
“Mamá! Elena se está moviendo a la… a la… a la… ”
Four agonizing seconds pass as her eyes flit, arms gesturing wildly toward the staircase where my 1-year-old is perched precariously, determined to practice her bouldering skills.
You can see the processing in my toddler’s brain as she searches for the right word.
Then, right as the awkwardness of the pause hits a make-or-break moment, a flash crosses her face and her lips curl upward, “La escalera!” she says triumphantly, having retrieved the word.
It’s glorious. And terrifying, if I’m honest. Watching the acquisition of language in real time. It’s this omnipresent reminder of how fragile and powerful the human brain is, all bottled up into a raging, boogered, glorious child.
Watching her wrestle with language retrieval, I recognize the same struggle in myself, except instead of searching for Spanish words, I'm fumbling for ways to express complex ideas.
Last week, as I tackled the graveyard of unfinished books and forgotten project scraps under my bed, I discovered a handwritten note from my birthday a few years ago.
“I still love learning, but am often frustrated by what I perceive as the limits of my intellect.”
It was a reminder that much like my kid, I'm constantly mining the recesses of my brain for understanding, only to discover that I often lack the vocabulary to describe what I’ve unearthed.
That is to say, I often feel intellectually lazy. Between the exhaustion of raising two kids under three and an educational background that left me without certain frameworks, I've convinced myself I'm just not built for rigorous analytical thinking.
But I’ve started to notice a pattern – that the way intellect and deep thinking is expressed in our modern society turns me off. As
said in a recent interview, “I think we’re coming from a place of believing that women are multifaceted and wanting to treat them like they’re smart…[but] for women to talk like they’re smart usually means to talk like they’re men…it’s so finance-bro-y, and it feels like it’s pretending.1”So I've built the perfect excuse fortress: too tired, not smart enough, and besides, who needs another mansplainy hot take? But watching my daughter fight for words has shattered that comfortable narrative.
My approach at this stage is two-fold:
I’m leveraging Claude and ChatGPT to dissect and map how my favorite thinkers critically approach ideas. Here’s a recent example (peak the mechanism deep dive at the end, I really learned something there).
I’m actively reading books that hit on this messy intersection of cognitive functions, processing styles and intelligence. Some current reads include: A Rulebook for Arguments, The Creative Act, Leonardo da Vinci and How To Make Sense of Any Mess.
I don’t know where this takes me, but I am crystal clear that I want to get better at learning. As I was reminded this week by
, there is energy in the emergent process. Of becoming a mom. Of becoming a professional. Of becoming a more attuned human. So I’m trying to capitalize on that.Your turn: Have you ever felt the gap between what you intuitively, internally understand and what you can outwardly express? What resources have helped you bridge that divide?
With thanks to with and for scratching the itch on how I can become a better thinker and storyteller.
https://jacobin.com/2025/02/diabolical-lies-podcast-feminism-socialism
You described also my experience as a retiree in the search for words as a bilingual person and the desire to keep on learning. Thank you Cristi
A love for learning is one of the most precious things to me. Reading this made me think of my mom: https://www.nextsmallthings.com/p/a-love-for-learning