I’ve been feeling like it’s been getting better, not worse. But maybe I’m not engaging in the posts where my thoughts are seen as controversial anymore.

I was insecure about a lot up until about my last year of college. I didn’t really overcome anything directly, but I did find a few things I could be proud of. I was able to look at myself and say I had a few things going for me, and so I began to like myself as a person, which I hadn’t been able to say before. I still have most of the stuff I’m insecure about but it just doesn’t affect me because I focus on the things I’m proud of.

Once you achieve that inner confidence, I believe it will display itself for others too, and you’ll feel like less people notice or think about the things you’re insecure about.

Great point! I considered that when I started learning and have spoken to it with my colleagues here who are also learning the language as well as Basotho- native speakers. Basotho who speak English fluently mostly agree that English has a broader vocabulary.

I’ve observed that Sesotho relies on tone and emphasis on parts of words more than English. There isn’t a whole lot of writing in Sesotho so I can imagine that the language hasn’t needed to develop ways to be descriptive that couldn’t be delivered with one’s voice.

Moreover, when I speak with Basotho that aren’t very proficient in English, I notice they very freely use words that a native English speaker would consider extreme, such as “perfect,” for mundane things because there is no explicit difference in Sesotho between “perfect” and merely “very good.”

The video I linked gets into it a bit that English is helped by being an amalgamation of several languages, and thus inherits multiple ways of describing a concept.

Gotten the hang of Southern Sotho at this point, and one thing that strikes me is how exact I can be with English and how I’ve always taken for granted how much access we have to things that allow us to give our words different meanings and implications. It just doesn’t exist to that extent in many other languages. It’s like when you hear the Eskimos have 50 words for snow or whatever. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but those words would describe different states or types of snow that speakers of that language recognize as distinct.

Also I watched this recently: https://youtu.be/NJYoqCDKoT4?si=Ppsm10i4ovI6M99g

May I ask where this is from?

First I’ll do whatever I can to be sure my communications and whereabouts aren’t trackable, tell my friends how to contact me, and recommend they use the same channels anyway.

Then I’ll find protests to go to and local campaigns to support however I see fit, and I’ll do that right up to the point where I feel unsafe, at which point I don’t know how I procede.