I started learning Italian at 66 because I needed proof that my brain could still want something new. The hardest part wasn't the conjugation tables. The hard part was admitting I'd spent decades not wanting anything for myself.

The first Italian word I learned was voglio. It means I want. I sat at my kitchen table in Singapore with a secondhand textbook and a notebook I'd bought specifically for this purpose — not a recycled one, not the back pages of a teaching planner — and I wrote it out in my best cursive. Voglio. I want. And then I stared at it for a long time because I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd used that phrase about anything that wasn't a grocery list or a doctor's appointment.

I was sixty-six. I'd been retired from teaching for two years. My second husband Ray had been dead for three. I had two replaced knees, arthritis creeping into my hands, and a life that was — by every external measure — stable. Quiet. Managed. And I was terrified. Not of death or illness or money, though those fears had their own permanent seats at my table. I was terrified because I'd realized, somewhere in the fog of widowhood and early retirement, that I didn't want anything. Not in the peaceful, Buddhist way. In the hollow way. The kind of not-wanting that comes from decades of training yourself out of desire because desire was never safe for women like me.

The real reason I opened that textbook

People assumed I started learning Italian because I wanted to travel. Or because I was bored. Or because I'd read some article about keeping your brain sharp — and sure, I'd read those articles. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology shows that bilingual learning in older adults can strengthen executive function and delay cognitive decline. I filed that information away the way I file away all useful things — as justification for something I actually wanted to do for reasons I couldn't yet articulate.

The truth was simpler and uglier. I needed proof. Proof that my brain could still reach toward something unfamiliar. Proof that I was still a person who could sit with difficulty — not the difficulty of grief or medical bills, which I'd had plenty of practice with — but the difficulty of choosing to be bad at something on purpose, with no audience and no grade and no child depending on the outcome.

I'd spent thirty-two years teaching English in a small Pennsylvania town. I knew how to conjugate. I knew how to parse sentences and correct dangling modifiers and stand in front of a room full of teenagers and make The Great Gatsby mean something. But all of that knowing was in service of others. It was my job. My role. My identity — Ms. M, the English teacher — and when that identity ended at sixty-four, I discovered something I've written about before: the first year of retirement doesn't strip away what you do. It strips away who you thought you were.

Italian was my attempt to find out who was left.

The wanting problem

I grew up the youngest of four sisters in a lower-middle-class household in Pennsylvania. My father worked at Sears for eighteen years. My mother was a seamstress. We didn't have the language of wanting in our house. We had the language of needing, of making do, of being grateful for what was already on the table. If you wanted something, you'd better have a good reason for it — and "because I feel like it" was never a good reason.

That training doesn't leave you. It burrows in. By the time I was raising two children on my own — fifteen years as a single mother, working full-time, stretching paychecks like fabric — wanting things for myself wasn't just impractical. It felt dangerous. A luxury I couldn't afford, not financially but emotionally. Because if I started wanting things — really wanting — I'd have to feel the gap between the life I had and the life I might have chosen if anyone had ever told me choosing was an option.

So I stopped. Not all at once. Not dramatically. I just let wanting atrophy, the way a muscle does when you stop using it. I wanted things for my children. I wanted things from my marriages. I wanted to be a good teacher, a reliable mother, a person who showed up. But wanting something purely for myself — something with no utility, no audience, no justification beyond pleasure? That circuit went dark sometime in my forties and I didn't notice until my sixties.

Research by psychologists Kennon Sheldon and Tim Kasser found that pursuing goals aligned with intrinsic motivation — things chosen freely, for personal meaning rather than external pressure — is significantly more predictive of well-being than pursuing goals out of obligation or social expectation. When I read that, years later, I thought: of course. But knowing that at sixty-six and doing something about it are two entirely different acts of courage.

What conjugation tables can't teach you

The mechanics of Italian are genuinely hard. The verb endings shift by person, tense, and mood. The subjunctive alone could fill a semester. My arthritic hands cramped after twenty minutes of writing exercises. I used an app on my phone that made me feel like a slow child — the cheerful ding of correct answers coming less often than I wanted, the patient repetition of words I'd already forgotten.

But the conjugation tables weren't the hard part. Not even close.

The hard part was sitting down at that table every morning and admitting, through the act of sitting down, that I had spent decades not wanting anything for myself. That I had confused selflessness with safety. That I had built a life — a good life, a life I'm not ungrateful for — on the quiet erasure of my own desires.

The hard part was telling my daughter I was learning Italian and hearing her say, "Oh, that's fun!" — the same voice she uses when I mention a new plant-based recipe — and realizing she had no framework for understanding that her mother doing something just for herself was not "fun." It was radical. It was the first time in her conscious memory.

The hard part was sitting in my widow's support group and saying, "I started learning Italian," and watching the other women nod politely, and knowing that most of them understood exactly what I meant by it, because most of them were also discovering — too late, too slowly, with too much grief in the room — that they had been living without desire for so long they'd mistaken numbness for contentment.

What this has to do with going vegan — and everything else

When I went vegan after watching Ray die — slowly, terribly, of a disease nobody in our family ever questioned until it was far too late — people treated it like a grief response. A phase. Something I'd grow out of once the shock wore off. But it wasn't a phase. It was the same muscle as the Italian. It was me, for the first time in decades, saying voglio — I want — and meaning it about something that had no function beyond aligning my life with my actual values.

I've written before about the particular loneliness of going vegan after sixty — the way every shared meal becomes a negotiation, the way your values suddenly have a social cost that is tallied at every holiday table. What I haven't said before is that the loneliness of veganism and the loneliness of learning Italian at sixty-six come from the same place. They both require you to announce — to your family, your friends, and most painfully to yourself — that you are still becoming someone. That you are not finished. That the version of you everyone got comfortable with was never the whole story.

And people don't like that. Not because they're cruel, but because your changing destabilizes the roles they've built around your staying the same. A study in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that people often react negatively to self-improvement in others when it implicitly highlights their own stagnation — a phenomenon researchers describe as threatened self-evaluation. I didn't need a study to tell me that. I saw it in my daughter's polite smile. In my son's gentle, "That's great, Mom." In the silence that followed both.

The permission no one gives you

I'm not fluent in Italian. I can order a meal. I can ask for directions. I can read a children's book with a dictionary nearby and feel something close to joy when I understand a paragraph without looking anything up. My accent is terrible. My grammar is shaky. I would embarrass myself in Rome.

I don't care.

What I care about is the twenty minutes every morning when I sit at my kitchen table with my notebook — the one I bought specifically for this, the one that serves no one but me — and I practice. I conjugate. I repeat. I get things wrong. I feel the arthritic stiffness in my fingers and I keep writing.

That practice taught me something that thirty-two years of teaching, two marriages, single motherhood, sobriety, therapy, and widowhood could not: that the loneliest version of yourself is the one everyone else is comfortable with. And that the cure for that loneliness isn't finding someone who sees you. It's seeing yourself — the self who wants, who reaches, who sits with difficulty not because she has to but because she chose to.

I host weekly vegan dinners now in my apartment in Singapore. Sometimes I label the dishes in Italian. My guests humor me. My granddaughter, the eight-year-old, tries to repeat the words and gets them gloriously wrong and doesn't care, and I think: that. That is the thing I lost. That willingness to want something and be bad at it and not apologize.

She didn't learn that from me. But I'm learning it from her.

What I'd say to anyone who recognizes this

If you're reading this and you realize — the way I realized, abruptly, at a kitchen table in a country far from where you started — that you can't remember the last time you wanted something just for yourself, I won't tell you it's never too late. I hate that phrase. It is late. That's the whole point. It's late, and it matters anyway.

Start with the word. Whatever language you choose — Italian, Mandarin, or just the honest English you've been avoiding — start with I want. Write it down. Say it out loud in your kitchen where no one can hear you. Notice how strange it feels in your mouth. Notice how your first instinct is to follow it with something practical, something justifiable, something that benefits someone else.

Then don't. Just let it sit there. I want. No object. No explanation. No apology.

That's the conjugation table no one gives you. The hardest verb in any language is the first person singular of to want — not because the grammar is difficult, but because somewhere along the way most of us were taught that conjugating it was selfish. And we believed that. And we stopped.

Voglio. I want. I'm still learning what comes after.