“You are Polish, right? But you have an accent.”

That’s what I heard from the lady who works at my favorite local bakery. It doesn’t bother me that I have an “accent” or that some features of my speech are perceived as non-native. What perplexes me is that I cannot hear it.

During four months, I lived as a returnee—a heritage speaker experiencing the language in a monolingual environment. In those months, I had some time to reflect on my strengths and limitations as a heritage speaker, but the questions that keep coming back to me are about my sense of self—who am I and where do I fit in?

One thing that I should clarify from the beginning is that I am barely literate in Polish. I can read street signs, restaurant menus, and other simple texts. I can get through a children’s book with some amount of effort. But in general, reading anything that is meant for literate adults is difficult and frustrates me quickly. Sometimes it’s funny to discover written words for the first time, but words that I’ve known my whole life. For example, there are words that I thought were one word are actually two, or vice-versa. “Oh, that’s how it’s written!” I think to myself. But fun discoveries aside, it’s painful to not read fluently, especially when you can read well (and enjoy reading!) in another language.

There is a sense of sadness when browsing books at the bookstore, and putting back the ones with too many words. I put back the ones that, realistically, I won’t be able to read. Once I purchased a book for my son with fairly large print and beautiful illustrations. The salesperson commented that it was a great book for a beginning reader. “Yeah, that’s me,” I thought to myself as I paid and left the store.