I never knew the hesitant, shy, serious girl I turned into sitting at the table with new friends from Rome. She stuttered when she spoke. Her opinions remained sealed behind her pouty lips. She rarely laughed, always fearful that she was the expense of other people’s jokes. She was an observer and a follower — never the leader she had been back home.

Newly arrived in Italy, in trying to find myself in another culture, I became another person. I slipped away into a cloud of insecurity about my American accent, my country’s short-lived history compared to the rest of the world, and its fading culinary traditions. I felt robbed of my self-confidence and my identity.

It was only the touch of a cool marble sink on my sweaty palms that would make the lump in my throat disappear. Enough of the subjunctive, conditional clauses, and inside jokes I couldn’t follow. I wanted silence. Only in a bathroom could I find it. There, I could shut out the regional accents, rolled “r”s, and invasive intonations. I could watch my bottled tears of frustration sprinkle onto the sink’s counter. I wished I could fill up the sink with warm water and slip into it for a long bath. Seeing myself in the mirror — the freckles I share with my brother, my father’s chin, eyes like my mother — reminded me that I was me. That I, like the entire jolly table outside, had family and friends back home. Who laughed at my jokes, didn’t judge me for grammatical errors or make me feel foolish for not speaking Italian fluently.

I found myself resentful of the Italians for making me turn into another person. What infuriated me most was when they answered in English after my attempts to speak their language. In conversing in baby Italian, I could hear my opinions and observations sounding like an eight-year-old’s. I was handicapped. I felt like a foreigner, a novel experience for an American. I suddenly regretted that I had never been nicer to the occasional foreigner I might have met at a party in New York. This was harder than any power-point presentation in front of a Board of Directors.

Words have always been my armor, my trump card. In moments of insecurity, doubt, or fear, they have enabled me to escape with dignity, humor and confidence. As a child, I was tall, gangly and gawky. But I could always win an ally or an admirer with a witty retort or a sly catch of phrase. I devoured books – from mystery capers to teenage romances. I wrote letters as voraciously as I read. My parents nicknamed me Horace Walpole for my lengthy correspondences with pen-pals. I craved completing a crossword puzzle with my grandfather. I reveled at the sight of my handwriting on stationary. I loved learning new words, and always circled ones I didn’t know in pencil. In short, my first love was language.

Which is why I couldn’t understand my misery in learning a new one in Italy. It was demeaning, demoralizing, discouraging. I had studied for three years but I could barely order a cappuccino without turning red. I felt tongue-tied, speechless, frustrated. Above all, I was exhausted.

An Italian doodled a cartoon one day of our pack of friends. Each caricature had a bubble overhead with the person’s most commonly used expression. He drew me as a slouching, starry-eyed Betty Boop. My bubble read simply, “I’m tired. Can we go home?” I vividly recall that feeling of being completely fuori servizio. Who was that person in the cartoon, I thought. He didn’t know me at all yet his depiction of me showed that he knew the new me, the me I couldn’t stand. All I wanted was the comfort of my duvet cover, a good book, or even a numbing episode of “Three’s Company,” something that would catapult me back to the comforts of America where I didn’t have to concentrate before speaking.

Some might say I tortured myself, insisting I not hang out with Americans, and only speaking in Italian to the Romans. I used to carry index cards in my pocket to Italian movies and scribble every word I didn’t know in the dark only to look it up later. I demanded that my Italian boyfriend, and now husband, speak only Italian with me and correct me when I goofed. He obeyed. But sometimes I resented him for correcting my pronunciation. I hated that he knew a word in English that escaped me in Italian. It was a dynamic to a relationship that I had never previously had with a boyfriend and it made me feel inferior. I was determined to show him that a language barrier would never divide us.

I started noticing how Italians would try to rob me of an expression. They would say something in English, thinking it was funny, cool and correct. And that’s where I started to pipe up, by merging my new language skills with my old use of turning a phrase. I memorized several descriptive verbs, nouns, adjectives and colloquial expressions that would make the locals stop, listen, and realize that I knew more than textbook Italian.

An Armenian, who for many years has lived in America, gave me the advice that I still think of daily that has helped me keep my linguistic armor polished. “Learn your country’s history like the back of your hand,” he said. “Read the great works of American literature, and learn how to cook the best American dishes well.”

He reminded me not to blame another country for my own inability to embrace my own past. One’s identity, he said, is defined by her origins and what she shows the world she can do with them. He made me understand that an identity is rarely something stolen. If so, it’s the fault of she who placed it somewhere where it could go swiped unnoticed.

I firmly believe that one can never know another country well unless she learns its language. I used to think that leading two lives, one in Italy and one in America, was complicated. I realize now that, instead, it is doubly enriching. Three years ago, my husband and I temporarily left our home in Rome to get married at my home in New York. Hoards of Italians came to celebrate us. Many of them gave toasts at our rehearsal dinner, all in English. It was the first time I had heard many of them speak my language. And it was the greatest gift they could have given me.