The conventional, monoglot sense of what it means to be bilingual, trilingual, and beyond does not permit of difficulties in self-rendering, let alone existential crises or identity trauma. We prefer to believe unthinkingly that what it means to be yourself across different cultural-linguistic contexts is clear-cut: you say the same things translated across your various languages. That the reality is often hugely different is something to which the majority of those who speak another language with some fluency will testify: a survey of over a thousand bilinguals found that two-thirds attested to feeling ‘like a different person’ when speaking different languages. To imagine a language means to imagine a life-form; to assume that you would be the same person in different languages, when not only the norms and rules but most likely also your social status and domains of experience and proficiencies within those languages are likely to be at least slightly if not fundamentally different, seems, when examined, plainly bizarre.