I tried to learn Mandarin three times. Three private classes. Three dropouts.

The irony isn't lost on me. I live in Singapore—one of the most conducive environments on earth to learn Mandarin. Resources are everywhere. Opportunities everywhere. It's practical. It's logical. It makes perfect sense.

And yet somehow, my brain just wouldn't.

Each class lasted three weeks at most before I quietly disappeared. No dramatic finish line. No “I give up” speech. Just… fading out. Skipping the next session. Not replying to the WhatsApp group. Letting the enrollment lapse like it was nobody’s business. And deep down, part of me felt relieved.

To this day, the full extent of my Mandarin is yi, er, san. One, two, three. The absolute basics. The things you learn in the first ten minutes and then never build on. I wasn't unmotivated. I tried. My brain simply filed a complaint every single time and refused to continue.

Meanwhile, at 12, I joined the English club. Nobody told me to. At 13, I was writing for the school paper. By 14, my English teacher was photocopying my essays to use as examples for other classes; my classmates were paying me to write their English homework (essays) in my second language and getting top marks.

I never had to be told to do any of it. I just loved it. Loved discovering the things I could say by writing them out, and reading it aloud to myself feeling posh.

Part of that love came from my mother. She loves English too, and despite the many differences between us, that is one thing I am genuinely thankful she passed on to me.

But the love really took root when I started working in a call center. That's where I learned to think in English, not just speak it. I'm Filipino, and my native language is Cebuano. A beautiful language. But there were concepts I carried inside me that Cebuano never gave me the words for.

English isn't the richest language in the world. But it's the one I know, and somehow it fits all my needs. It gives words to things my mother tongue couldn't reach. It makes me articulate what's in my heart in a way I never could before. Like my mind had been waiting for the right key to unlock the door.

I used to think the Mandarin thing was just a funny personal quirk. A glitch in my learning apparatus.

But now I think it's something more honest.

You see, logic optimises for survival. It tells you what's useful, what fits, what will keep you safe in the system you're in. Mandarin would have made me more useful in Singapore. More logical. More practical.

But identity doesn't care about usefulness. Identity cares about truth.

My brain knew before I did that Mandarin wasn't mine. It wasn't that I couldn't learn it. It's that it was never mine to learn. English, on the other hand, is where I became myself. Not the language of my birthplace. Not the most practical choice for where I live. But the one that, somewhere between a call center training room and a school paper and a childhood I'm still making sense of, turned out to be one of the most accurate maps of who I actually am.

What if the impractical thing you keep gravitating toward isn't a distraction, but the most honest data you have about yourself?

What if the thing your body refuses to do, even when logic says you should, is actually trying to tell you something worth listening to?