Learn the grammar before you judge the manners

The single hardest adjustment, when I moved to the Netherlands to stay, was the Dutch directness.

In the Namibia I grew up in, communication is layered. You soften bad news. You wrap a criticism in three kindnesses. You allow a person to keep their dignity by never quite saying the hard thing to their face, trusting that they will understand it from the space around your words. This is not dishonesty. It is courtesy, and courtesy is a form of respect, and I had spent my whole life fluent in it.

In the Netherlands the same softening that I understood as respect was understood as evasion, and the same bluntness that I understood as rudeness was understood as respect. A Dutch colleague who told me, flatly, that my idea was wrong was not attacking me. They were paying me the compliment of assuming I could take it.

When something in a new country strikes you as rude, or cold, or careless, the useful first assumption is not that the country is rude, but that you are still reading it in your mother tongue. Every culture has a grammar, and the grammar governs not only its language but its manners, its silences, its way of saying no.

The directness that offended me in my first weeks became, once I had learned to read it, one of the things I came to value most. There is a deep relief, after a lifetime of decoding what people really mean, in living among people who simply say it.

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What I learned

Starting over as an adult takes a particular courage: the courage to be a beginner again after you have already become competent at something. Expect the awkwardness. It is not a sign you have made a mistake. It is the price of the growth, and it is temporary.

Learn how a place works before you decide what it means. Much of what offends you at first will turn out to be something you come to love.

Adapted from Learning to Belong, Chapter 5, "Starting over". About the book