It was written completely from a sincere place. I used to study linguistics and 10 years ago was pretty darn good at languages. I see dudes like Tim Ferriss saying they can learn a new language in three months (I question this) and I speak to Europeans and Africans who have 5-7 languages. I used to take liguistics classes and could converse in a numer of languages. Being good at languages was part of my identity. However, we can't be good at everything. If you don't use a muscle it atrophies and that's happening with my language skills. That's what I was trying (perhaps unsuccessfully?) to express. I'm sad that this part of my identity isn't working like it used to and it makes me feel like an imposter.
Thanks for the clarification. I didn't realize that aspect of your background. I'm a typical American (well, US native to be more precise) -- we're lucky if we know one language.
I liked your C language example.