Lost in Translation, Found in Pause

 The Unfamiliar Country of Stillness

For the first time in four years, I pressed pause. Not a holiday, not an escape, but a deliberate month of stillness — time to read, to sit quietly with myself, to relearn the rhythms of being rather than doing. The act felt both radical and unfamiliar. I had been so used to moving without interruption that stillness seemed like a foreign country, one whose language I did not yet speak.

The First Pause

It was in this silence that I returned to books, not as tools for research or productivity but as companions. Khalil Gibran’s words felt like rediscovered echoes: “Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.” For years, I had read this as poetry. In the pause, I read it as instruction.

There was something almost startling about remembering that life, at its core, is not about performance or efficiency, but about presence. To walk barefoot on the earth, to let the wind touch you: these are gestures of being that cannot be translated into utility.

In conjunction with Gibran, I also revisited Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. Butler's argument that identity is not essence but performance struck me afresh. In frivolous but weighty phrases, we learn rules and habits of inhabiting identity; we repeat gestures, articulate expectations and responses to those expectations so many times that we interpellate the maker of that performance as an identity — as something that feels as if it is "just always you". 

In the depths of my pause, I finally began to uncover the places in my own self that had come out of being pragmatic and was constructed of rehearsal and repetition. In order to be steadfast, congenial, or efficient — these things were not merely a part of my personality, they were also rehearsals that were built upon what was expected of me.

Lost in Translation

The silence disrupted the interpretation. I no longer had to constantly interpret myself into others' roles. I didn't have to be "productive" to justify my being or, "agreeable" to be agreeable. At first, this felt disorienting. Without familiar cues of performance, I felt suspended, almost unanchored.

Slowly, that suspension morphed into something more like liberation - a realization that identity + performance are not a closed room, but a door that is always slightly open.

This is what it means to feel "lost in translation." Not just miscommunication, or lack of interpreting between languages, but the ways in which the self gets mistranslated in the interest of being readable/legible to others. Women are often translating/fitting themselves into roles that are recognizably understandable; the reliable one, the self-sacrificing one, the endlessly competent one. And yet, while part of me in this is translating/fitting parts of myself disappear, remain unspoken, untranslated.

Reclaiming Fragments 

During my month of stillness, I began to reclaim the untranslated fragments. Reading for pleasure, relishing silence, writing absent an agenda, were not indulgences. They were possibilities to remember different versions of myself. They were reminders that there is always more to us than the scripts we act out.

Butler’s provocation in Gender Trouble is not only that identity is performance but that in acknowledging this, we can encounter sites of resistance. Pausing is one way to resist. It interrupts the flow of performance enough for us to imagine something different.

Silence as Resistance

I do not want to romanticise this pause. Stillness is not easy. It brings questions to our attention that we might have been rationalising away. It puts us into silence. Silence can feel unsettling, responsibility co-opting silence in a world that is constantly clamouring for our attention.

But maybe, precisely because it is hard, it is also necessary. Pausing is to intimately know this: our value is not reliant on continuous translation and productivity, nor caretaking.  It is to know the possibility of selves yet unencountered because we have been performing selves that are already familiar to us.

Becoming in the Pause

To pause is to reclaim time, to resist constant performance, and to honour the parts of ourselves that resist translation. It is in those moments — unscripted, unproductive, untranslatable — that we come closest to hearing our own voices again.

And sometimes, being found in pause is the most radical form of presence.

So, when was the last time you allowed yourself to simply be — without performance, without translation, without explanation?