I have three voices. There is the work voice, American and competent, full of phrases like circle back. There is the family voice, which softens at the edges and uses words I would not use in any other room. And there is the friend voice, a kind of code-switched English-Tamil-Hindi hybrid I share with maybe eight people on the planet. On a Tuesday I might use all three within the same hour. A 9am stand-up, a call to my mother on the way back from coffee, a text to my college roommate that opens with hi da. By six pm I am tired in a way that is not about the work.
I used to think this was a discipline I had mastered. I am bilingual, I would have said, casually, at parties, the way some people are bilingual in French and English. The frame was wrong. Bilingualism is the technical part. Code-switching is something else. Code-switching is the constant, low-grade calculation about which version of yourself is allowed in this room, and the price of getting it wrong.
There is a particular feeling, late on a weekday, that I have been trying to name for years. It is not exhaustion exactly. It is more like the feeling of having performed in three plays back to back, in three different languages, with no intermission. You are not sad. You are just no longer sure where the original you ended and the performances began.
I noticed it most clearly the year I was promoted at work. The promotion came with a new layer of code-switching I had not anticipated. I had to speak, in meetings, in a register slightly more authoritative than I had previously used. I had to lower my voice, very slightly, on Zoom. I had to stop apologizing in emails. I had to add, in front of clients, a kind of casual confidence that does not naturally exist in me, because I was raised by women who were taught that confidence in a woman is a warning sign. The cost was not visible until I noticed, one evening, that I had started doing the work-voice with my husband. He noticed before I did. He said: who am I talking to right now.
I think a lot of us, in the diaspora, end up in this place without realizing how we got here. The original code-switch is one we did not choose. It was given to us in elementary school, when we figured out which version of our name to volunteer to the substitute teacher. It was given to us in middle school, when we figured out which lunch was acceptable to eat in the cafeteria. We were children doing complex social calculus, and we got very, very good at it. The skill is real. The skill also calcifies.
By the time you are in your thirties, the code-switching has stopped being a skill and started being a condition. You do it without consent. You do it when you do not need to. You walk into a room of South Asian women you grew up with and you start, against your will, to file the edges off your American voice, even though everyone in the room has the same edges. You walk into a work dinner and you preemptively stop telling the story you were about to tell, because you have done the cost-benefit analysis on it, and the story does not survive the room.
What is exhausting is not the switching. What is exhausting is the surveillance. There is a part of you, all the time, monitoring. Watching the room. Adjusting the dial. Asking: am I being too much. Am I being too little. Whose accent is this. Is this person going to ask where I am really from. If I make this joke will it land or will I have to explain it.
I have started, in my thirties, to do something my twenty-five-year-old self would have considered suicidal. I have started letting the wrong voice come out in the wrong room. I bring my full Tamil-inflected English into a work dinner. I bring my flat American R's home to my mother. I let the joke that requires context land or not land. I am bad at it. I forget, sometimes, and switch back. But I am practicing.
The practice is not about authenticity, which is a word that has been overused into meaninglessness. The practice is about cost. There is an energetic cost to running three operating systems on one nervous system, and I am, in my late thirties, no longer willing to pay it at the rate I once did. I would rather be slightly the wrong person in the room and have some energy left over for my actual life than be precisely the right person in the room and arrive at my own front door empty.
I do not have a solution. I am not sure there is one. I think most of us in the diaspora are going to die a little code-switched, because the conditions that built the muscle are not going anywhere. What I am trying to do is notice. Notice when I am doing it. Notice when I do not have to. Notice, especially, the rooms in which I do not have to — the friends, the Keeper, the one cousin who knew me before any of this — and stay in those rooms longer. They are the rooms in which I get the original voice back, briefly, before Monday.