When I Got Tired of Translating Myself
The fatigue wasn’t the work—it was the constant translation.
An Art of Drinking Water reflection · 5 minute read
I didn’t lose my voice all at once.
I learned to set it down carefully.
At work, I adjusted my speech before it reached my mouth.
Smoothed the edges.
Chose words that felt safer than honest.
I adjusted my demeanor.
The way I laughed.
The way I paused before responding.
Even my humor learned where it was welcome—and where it wasn’t.
None of this was accidental.
It was survival.
Code-switching isn’t about being fake.
It’s about being fluent in environments that were not designed with you in mind.
It’s knowing which version of yourself will be understood,
which will be tolerated,
and which will be punished.
So you split.
One version of you shows up polished, neutral, measured.
Another waits quietly for the end of the day—
full of color, rhythm, emotion, ease.
You move between them so often that the transition becomes automatic.
Until one day, it becomes exhausting.
Not because the work is hard—
but because you are doing double duty.
You are managing tasks and perceptions.
Deliverables and digestibility.
Competence and comfort.
And somewhere in that effort, something subtle happens.
Your natural voice starts to feel risky.
You hesitate before speaking.
You replay sentences in your head before offering them aloud.
You wonder whether what feels true to you will feel acceptable to the room.
You begin to ask yourself questions that were never meant to be yours:
Am I too much?
Am I saying this the right way?
Who do they need me to be right now?
That’s when the fatigue sets in.
Because living between worlds means never fully resting in either.
At work, you’re performing restraint.
At home, you’re decompressing from it.
And over time, the distance between who you are
and who you present becomes heavy.
Water taught me something here.
Water doesn’t split itself to fit the container.
It doesn’t apologize for its temperature, its movement, its sound.
When water is poured into a space that can’t hold it,
it leaks.
Not out of defiance—
out of truth.
I realized that my exhaustion wasn’t a personal failing.
It was the cost of constant translation.
So I started listening for where my voice felt easiest.
Where laughter didn’t need editing.
Where clarity didn’t require cushioning.
I began to notice which spaces asked me to fragment
and which allowed me to arrive whole.
If you are tired in a way that sleep doesn’t fix,
if your voice feels distant even when you’re speaking,
if you feel split between who you are and who you’re expected to be—
know this:
You are not unprofessional.
You are not inconsistent.
You are not confused.
You are carrying the weight of adaptation.
And while code-switching may be a skill,
it is not meant to be a permanent state.
Like water responding to gravity,
your voice will always seek its natural level.
The question is not whether you can keep translating yourself.
It’s whether you are ready to be somewhere
that understands you without subtitles.