#19 What the vaak?

Everything is constructed

When I was eighteen, I worked as an au pair in America.

One night I was sitting with friends who were endlessly entertained by my Afrikaans.

“Mariki, how do you say candle in Afrikaans?”

“Kers.”

“How do you say flower?”

“Blom.”

And then someone asked, “How do you say sleepy?” I answered. They burst into laughter. Because the word for sleepy in Afrikaans is “vaak”. You pronounce three sounds: “f” as the f in fork, “aa” as the u in duck, “k” as the ck in… well, luck.

The sound I had just made in perfectly innocent in Afrikaans, meant something very different in English. For the rest of the night everyone walked around misusing my word,: “Oh, I’m so v-aa-k right now.” “You look so v-aa-k.” “What the v-aa-k??”

Same sound, different meaning. And in a different context, an entirely different reaction.

This is one little example to illustrate the very first principle in this book - nothing means what you think it means. Meaning is always constructed.

By culture.

By parents.

By schools.

By the herd that raises you.

No baby is born knowing what blue is. Someone points and says, “That’s blue.” And you believe them. And as a grown up, you don’t have to run through a colour wheel to double check when someone uses the word blue. You just know.

The same thing happens in relationships.

No baby is born knowing what love looks like, what will get you rejected, what a partner needs, how to ask for what you need, what is “too much”, what is “not enough”.

You learn. You start building a map of how love and relationships work from the moment you are born, and then you spend your adult life trying to navigate your relationships based on a map that a toddler drew.

The good news is, if meaning is learned, it can be unlearned. If it was constructed, it can be deconstructed and reconstructed. Just like learning a second language, you can slowly change the meaning that you give. And with that, start building a fuller, more alive picture of what relationships can be.