The Door I Once Walked Through

When I was sixteen, I spent five weeks at a summer school in Saltillo, Mexico.

Classes ran all morning—grammar, vocabulary, cooking. In the afternoons I met one-on-one with a tutor named Teresa. We talked for hours about ordinary things: friends, school, music, life.

Something strange happened.

Spanish did not feel learned.
It felt remembered.

Words came without effort. Verb forms landed correctly before I had time to think. Conversation moved at the speed of thought. It was as if a door in my brain had swung open and language was already there, waiting.

When I returned home, my school tested me and placed me directly into fourth-year Spanish. The next year, in France, a teacher stopped me mid-paragraph and asked if I was Mexican. Years later, I tested out of an entire year of university Spanish.

Then the door closed.

The fluency faded. Vocabulary thinned. The automatic quality disappeared.

Now, decades later, I still notice flashes of it. I’ll say something correctly and wonder how I knew. But it takes work again. Study. Repetition. Effort.

I have tried to recreate that earlier state. Language apps. Classes. TED talks promising fluency in ninety days.

None of them touch what happened that summer.

It wasn’t technique.

It was brain state.

Looking back, I suspect it was tied to the same neurochemistry that has shaped much of my life—a bipolar spectrum brain that sometimes runs too fast, sometimes too slow. During that season, it ran bright. Learning felt supercharged. Memory stuck like wet paint.

Gift and cost, in the same wiring.

The experience left me with a question that still nags at me:

If the brain could open like that once, what conditions made it possible?

And can the door be opened again—safely, deliberately, without the crash that used to follow?

I’m still looking for the key.