Some of you might not read this because it's long, but for those that do, thank you.

Since I was young, I've been surrounded by languages. I grew up around the Spanish and French language and a little Chinese and Japanese culture (but then, I wasn't sure what it was). I've always wanted to learn, but I didn't learn my first language until my third year of middle school. Going through high school, I continued to learn Spanish, but I was introduced to the medical field. I decided during my freshman year of high school that I wanted to be a doctor. I stopped learning Spanish because I was too shy to speak it in front of my classmates in Spanish IV at my high school. I went onto college pursuing a Chemistry degree and following the medical track.

3 years in, I picked up Japanese as a second language because I was interested in the language. I recognized the culture, so I thought "Maybe I can learn the language, too". I took elective cultural classes in addition to the core classes I needed to take for the chemistry degree. On the last day of school, on my way to my last final exam, I got hit by a car while riding my bicycle. I suffered from a few scrapes and bruises, a fractured finger, and a concussion. It was 3 days before my 21st birthday. 3 days after my birthday, I woke up unable to speak. I couldn't speak English, Japanese, nor Spanish. They were the only languages I knew. This inability to speak lasted for 3 months. Along with my inability to speak, I was unable to remember anything from before my accident, including my upbringing. I knew about my family, but I couldn't remember the memories we made together. This memory loss resulted in my advisor at school advising me to change my major if I wanted to graduate on time. I had taken so many cultural electives alongside my core curriculum, that I actually met the requirements for three additional degrees. So, I chose the humanities route and graduated with a degree in Religion and Anthropology, and a minor in Japanese.

The next semester, I met a girl at my school. She was a foreign exchange student and she was assigned to my apartment to live with me and  my two other roommates. I didn't know anything about where she was from, but I knew that her name was different. Turns out that she was from Korea. At the time, I was still recovering my ability to speak English. She was learning English and couldn't speak it well. We helped each other and eventually she had to leave. Before she left, she said, "Come to my country". I didn't know anything about Korea, but I said, "I'll try". A month after she left, another foreign exchange student came for the same program. I got to know her too. She asked for me to go to her country (Korea) when she was leaving, too.

I went to Korea and decided to try teaching. I liked it and in turn, I learned Korean during my three years there. I decided from my first year, that I would like to be a translator/interpreter, because I understood that struggles of learning a language. I also understood how hard it is to express yourself clearly in another language. So, I started to study Korea and restart studying Spanish and Japanese. It was all great and I became "fluent" in three months.

Now that I'm back in America, I feel like my language learning ability has decreased. Not just in Korean, but in everything. I am turning 28 in 4 days, and everyday closer to my birthday causes me to become more depressed. I feel like a failure, because I'm not doing what I thought I would be doing with languages. I had a passion for languages, but now, I feel like I don't have a passion for anything. I don't know what to do anymore and I've become depressed. I've tried reading, writing, speaking, and listening to the languages in many ways. I've even tried learning through language exchanges, but because I'm an English teacher, they end up being one-way tickets to English-only practice, because no one seems to want to help an English teacher learn something other than English. For the last week, week and a half, I've felt useless in the language world. So, I am thinking about giving up. I've spent so much time to learn languages that now that it's practically going in one ear and out the other, I feel like my time is just being wasted. I understand that people plateau, but this plateau feels more like a landslide. I've never felt so depressed in my life. Actually, no; the last time I felt this depressed, was when I got hit by a car in 2010.

What would you do in a situation like this?