Affected

Have you ever been in one of those situations where someone says something to you and you can't think of anything clever to say at the time, but think of something you could have said about an hour later? I think this sort of thing has happened to me a lot.
Now imagine a similar kind of experience to that the majority of the day almost every day of the week! In some ways that is what is feels like to learn a foreign language well. When you get beyond feeling good that you know how to say hi, my name is, and count to 10, it starts to set in that there is so much to know the deeper you get.
After a few weeks of not understanding everything that is being said to you and, more critically, not being able to say what you want back, you begin to feel very slow. It takes me a minute to process what was said and then I can't say exactly what I want a lot of the time.

Try playing basketball with one hand tied behind your back. Try to speak with your tongue tied behind your back! After a while it sort of starts to weigh on you and you feel a little bit slow and not very smart. That happened to me this week. Monday was hard. I climbed out of it a bit the rest of the week but am still feeling the effects of it.
Thinking back, I hear that this sort of feeling is common among those trying to learn a new language so quickly, but that doesn't make it feel any better. I just need to keep studying, praying, and pressing forward. It'll come. I'll work hard this week to solidify what I know before I take a test at the beginning of the next week to see how my learning is coming along. Hopefully it will really start coming together. We learn at such a frenetic pace!
It's great for my tired but satisfied brain, and maybe sometimes a little damaging to my emotional sense of self, but I am so happy and feel a little like I'm in dreamland when I think that this is actually my job right now to learn a language. How cool is that!