Nadia noticed it first at a dinner party in Rotterdam. She was funnier in Dutch. Not better at Dutch. She still made mistakes with articles and occasionally invented plurals. But something in her loosened when she spoke it. She interrupted people. She made jokes that were slightly too sharp and did not apologise for them. In Arabic, her first language, she was careful. Every sentence carried the weight of who was listening, who was older, what had been said at some family gathering in 1998. A linguist at the party told her this was well documented. People often report reduced emotional intensity in a second language. Swearing feels less severe. Difficult decisions feel more manageable. Some therapists deliberately switch languages with bilingual patients for exactly this reason. "So I am braver in Dutch," Nadia said, "because it means less to me." "Or because it costs less," he said. She thought about that for a long time afterwards. Her mother called every Sunday. They spoke Arabic, of course, and the conversations followed the same route they always had: health, weather, a cousin's wedding, nothing underneath. Once, near the end of a call, Nadia tried to say something true about how difficult the year had been. The words were available. She knew all of them. But saying them in that language, in that voice, to that person, felt like lifting something far heavier than it was. She said she was tired and had a busy week. Later she wrote it all down in Dutch, in a notebook nobody would read, and found that it took four minutes.