The last excuse I told myself
English was never the problem. And how I learned to swing the bat.
—Hast du Feuer?
—What, you mean... FOY-ah? Follar? What?
The first time a German asked me for a light, I thought he wanted to sleep with me.
Follar is a wonderful Spanish word. It means "to fuck." Lost in translation, it became the beginning of this story.
We lasted about as long as August does. Or the time it takes to pack up a caravan for five.
If you think this is about a German, keep reading. I promise I’ll disappoint you pretty quickly.
This is about the last excuse.
We all have one.
The German. Our age. Money. The city we were born in. Our contacts. It doesn’t matter which one.
We always find a story convincing enough to keep being who we are instead of becoming who we could be. That version of ourselves who dances alone with her eyes closed and has a much wiser —and way sexier— voice inside her head.
Mine was English.
Or it was.
Seville. 2025.
There I was. Completely frozen. A person I admired. A conversation waiting to happen. And a mix of frustration and disappointment with myself that I still chew on whenever I remember it. So completely trapped inside Mari Complejines, my inner Little Miss Hang-ups, that I honestly think if someone had asked me to count to twenty, I would have stopped at seventeen.
Of course, I blamed my English.
The funny thing is that, at the very same time, I had already been working in English for months.
Consulting. Almost daily follow-ups. Long conversations. Intense ones.
And there, English was never an obstacle.
It was just another arena.
It forced me to think more slowly. To choose my words more carefully. To listen to myself while building an idea live.
It became another way of thinking about myself from a higher altitude.
And yet...
Let it beeeeeeee!
Total frozen mode.
Then things started happening.
Or rather, I started paying attention to them.
While I kept blaming English for my own shadow, English —and life— kept insisting on proving me wrong.
First, her.
One of those minds I admire. One of those people I envy for her courage.
I first heard her speak live in Seville.
Later, in a podcast, she said something that got stuck in my head with that unmistakable accent of hers:
“English is the language of business.”
And since I make a living writing —and business is my middle name— I thought:
Well... we’re in trouble.
Some time later she read several of my articles. We started exchanging ideas. And I thought:
Well... I must be doing something right.
Then came him.
We talked for a while. Later he started recommending my work while I was still writing only in Spanish.
And I was like:
Lines Aja... wake up. Signs. You’re not Joaquin Phoenix, but maybe pay attention to the signs.
Swing the bat!
Not because I particularly believe in destiny.
But because there comes a point when the same idea keeps showing up wearing different costumes. Costumes so loud that, once you look closely enough, pretending you haven’t seen them stops being an option.
A colleague, just a few days ago, this time in Spanish, tells me about hyperstition.
The idea is simple.
And it hits like a brick.
Some beliefs don’t describe reality.
They create it.
Like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And then I started thinking about all the sentences that had marked me.
Not the ones I remembered. The ones I kept following without even noticing. Or maybe I did notice. I’m not that innocent either.
“Ideas don’t wear rank.”
Meaning it doesn’t matter whether you’ve been doing this for three years or thirty-three. Ideas don’t care about job titles, and some people never even manage to warm up the chair.
“What are you afraid of? Success?”
“Step on the gas.”
And a few more.
So while I was thinking about cognitive biases (yep, you know me), self-fulfilling prophecies and all those sentences that had shaped me, I realized they were never just combinations of words.
Because there are sentences you repeat to yourself. Stories you keep telling yourself. And hypotheses about yourself that only you decide whether to turn into theories.
And then I remembered that German again. Because that had never been a language problem. It had been a story problem.
I didn’t misunderstand his words. I misunderstood the story my head wrote around them.
And maybe I’d been doing exactly the same thing to myself for years. I’d come across a few words, build a sentence around them, and then an entire world.
English had never been the problem. It had been my last excuse.
The last story I’d been telling myself so I wouldn’t have to step into the places I wanted to belong.
I’m sure Paulo Coelho has a quote for this.
But here’s the thing.
The moment the excuse disappears...
Only I remain.
Or you.
No one else to blame.
Just that version of yourself that’s been waiting far too long for permission to step onto the field instead of warming the bench.
Even if you misunderstood a few words. Even with your accent.
Maybe especially because of your accent.
Making peace with the sound of your own voice in voice notes and recordings...
Well.
That’ll probably take a little longer.
Lines Aja
Brand Strategist & Verbal Identity Consultant — Las Musas®
cultooruido.com