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The board · Amsterdam · Curious

A year of reading about this in two languages and doing none of it

Posted as reading_two_languages, 12 August 2026

Looking for
one honest conversation with somebody a long way in
Experience
None. A year of reading and no messages sent until now.
Around
the south, Amsterdam

I have been reading about this for about a year, in two languages, in a browser with the history cleared, the way you research a symptom that frightens you. This is the first thing I have ever written anywhere. I have rewritten it four times and each version was more polite and less true than the last, so I am sending the fourth before I can improve it further.

Thirty four, the south, no experience of anything in this world. What I have is a very clear sense that something is missing and an extremely unclear sense of what it is. A year of reading has given me the vocabulary and nothing else, which I now understand is the least useful preparation available.

What I want is one honest conversation with somebody who has been at this for years and can tell me what it is actually like on a Tuesday. Not the intense version. The maintenance version. Whether it takes up much of your life. Whether people are as careful as these posts suggest.

I am not looking for anything today, and possibly not this year. I would simply like to stop being a person who reads about things.

Not looking to be assessed. Not looking for anybody who wants to skip to arranging something. Not looking for a person who is bored of explaining, which is fair, and I will not take it personally.

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What to have sorted before you reply

If this one reads like your own head rather than somebody to answer, the tactics can wait. These three all happen before there is a first match to get wrong.

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