About vague thinking

I once went for a hike in Georgia, the forest was magnificent; it was drowning in a cloud. As I was walking through the fog, everything looked blurred and had a touch of mysteriousness to it. We like mysterious, it creates lots of room for projecting. And I recently realized that for over 5 years I was choosing to process my life in a blurred, vague manner.?

"Be precise in your speech" - that’s rule 10 in Jordan Peterson’s book, which I was reading a few months ago. That’s when the realization above hit me. I owe many insights to Dr. Peterson, like realizing I was also choosing to literally blur my surroundings by not wearing glasses with my imperfect vision (it’s been a year since I can see clearly??). Imprecise vision is not that uncommon, though. What about imprecise thinking??

For a few years of my life (it’s hard to say for sure, but from 16 to 23 would be my rough estimation) my thoughts were quite vague because the English language that I used for thinking in most situations was full of unclarity for me. We use words (particularly nouns and adjectives) to name and categorize objects and differentiate between categories. And so my categorization was vague and categories differentiated poorly… Well, incompletely. Less completely than a native language would typically allow. And that was by choice. I relied on contextual understanding and associations rather than precise definitions or translations.?

Most Russian-speaking people I know resist transitioning to thinking in English because lacking clarity makes them feel uncomfortable. It causes annoyance and sometimes anxiety, as far as I could understand. But I had gotten so used to lack of clarity in my thoughts that starting from some point I could barely register it.?

Now I can define the vocabulary I use more precisely, and I try to practice formulating my thoughts clearly in both languages (thanks to all of my friends who are ready to listen to me thinking out loud in long voice messages). But still sometimes in my daydreams I would have an under-articulated thought and just leave it at that. It's like I'm too lazy to shape a complete thought.?

It’s funny, I always rationalized my preference for using English by its comparative clarity, orderliness, and logic. And yet by using it I was avoiding order in my thoughts, preferring to, let's say, keep one foot in the underworld. I wouldn't associate it with complete darkness, more like twilight. The age that came to mind - 16 to 23 - that was after I transitioned a substantial share of thinking into English (including all the self reflective thinking), and before the amount of unclarity reduced to insignificant - or so I want to believe. That's also the age when my self felt most undifferentiated, undefined, and vague. When my identity was scattered. When I dissociated a lot. When I had no idea who I was. When I struggled with integrating and processing my experiences - they were clustered and full of meaning within those clusters, but didn’t add up to form a complete whole that would make sense to me. I mean, developmentally that's also quite normal for that age. But now I'm curious if my choice of language to process the self and the world has affected that dynamic.?

On the upside, it's possible that lacking precision in categorization leaves more room for interpretation, allowing for more creativity and tracing interconnections between different fields. Also, somehow I'm getting a feeling that lack of clarity and differentiation has something to do with me hiding from the authority judgment. My mom can't reach me in my thoughts - that's what has crossed my mind. And it makes sense - it's like I felt the need to reassemble myself, to go back to the chaotic state and build a new order, not dictated (literally!) by my caregivers and other authority figures. I started that process at 13 - but could only formulate shreds of thoughts back then.

Another peculiar observation is that I lacked clarity in words - concepts, categories - but not in relationships between them. The grammatical structure of the language has always been clear to me, and easy to grasp. First, I learned it logically, like math. Then, starting from some point, I didn't need to put any conscious effort into adopting grammar patterns.?

So it's like understanding the relationship between categories, how they interact, helped me learn about the categories themselves, to understand their purpose and how they manifest in different contexts. Basically, to understand their significance without necessarily being able to give them exact definitions.

To sum up, here are a few hypotheses about what the process of learning a second language entails:

1. To me it doesn’t appear possible to transition to thinking in another language without sacrificing clarity and ability to formulate thoughts precisely - for some time. In my case it took years, but I wasn’t in a rush. To clarify here, I think it is possible to become more or less precise within a certain vocabulary bubble (e.g., communicating with your colleagues at work) in a short period of time, like months.?
2. Practicing formulating your thoughts - preferably out loud, but at least in writing - will help speed up this process. Once you do it several times in the same context (e.g., chat communication with colleagues at a new job) - this particular communicative situation becomes easy to engage in.?
3. Understanding grammar intuitively can greatly help with processing what you read / hear, even if there are many unknown words. How to achieve this intuitive understanding can vary from one learning type to another. For me it was learning some basic grammar and then just consuming lots of content for fun (like watching 8 seasons of Supernatural, reading Game of Thrones books). So it took a while.
4. Accepting the position of ‘I don’t know much more than I do know - and that’s OK’, instead of ‘I must know everything’ - seems to be the way to go about it. It sounds trivial and easy and natural at the first stages of learning anything new. But it’s not easy for a, say, C-level manager or a senior professional to communicate from this position. Especially when a certain level of expertise is expected. That’s why making a second language a part of your daily life - not just work - seems very important to me. So that there is safe space for experimenting, improvising, making funny mistakes, making a fool of oneself even without any reputational risks and anxiety associated with that.?
5. Finally, and maybe this one is just my wishful thinking, but I believe that acquiring one more language - not by simply learning words’ translations and rules of how to assemble those words in a sentence, but actually regressing to a state of thinking where things are less defined, and then narrowing down and calibrating their meaning through a multitude of contexts - can help one perceive the world differently, and also themselves in this world. To become less of a mirror of their native culture and more of a differentiated self. Of course, any language comes with someone’s culture. But as adults we can critically analyze this culture, its faults and benefits, rather than blindly absorb all of it.

Hypothetically ??

Let me know what you think! How do you handle hearing unfamiliar words? Not being sure about the meaning of some phrases that you want to say??