#generationalcurses

I know.

I know my mother and father were both abused by their parents and that they didn't deserve it.

I also know that it's not my job to care.

The linguist in me became curious about it, so I did a little digging and found a linguistic theory that explained it: how Italy wasn’t the unified country we know today until after World War Two, and how through most of its history, it was a conglomeration of kingdoms and city states. How during the days of Rome, it was a far-reaching empire of multiple cultures and peoples. How all these disparate groups across the Mediterranean region spoke with unique accents and diverse dialects of the common Latin tongue. How despite these differences, all the average civilians relied on each other for trade and governance and protection, and thus had to figure out a way to understand one another through the differences. How an unofficial, rudimentary sign language was their way of doing that.

The theory goes that these people, for thousands of years and hundreds of generations, used their own bare hands to understand and be understood; that today, the peoples and descendants of those modern nations around the Mediterranean still talk so animatedly with their hands because it’s so deeply ingrained in their cultural DNA. 

I remember growing up how Italian Americans and Greek Americans and Portuguese Americans were stereotyped as being handtalkers. I remember the “joke” about how you could get a Moroccan American to shut up by tying his hands behind his back. I remember being told by my Algebra teacher to sit on my hands when I was talking because my constantly waving hands were a “distraction” to other students. I remember watching videos of myself giving speeches, and being mortified by how noticeably my hands moved with nearly every word, grand gestures that tried absurdly to illustrate the images in my mind with my fingertips, independent of my even realizing it. 

This thing about myself that’s always embarrassed me so much is a habit of human connection written in my DNA after generations of my ancestors wanted to share their lives so desperately that, when confronted with seemingly impossible barriers, they used the very skin on their bones to communicate.