Ever felt the urge to re-invent yourself?

I just came across this amazing essay by writer Jhumpa Lahiri on how to re-invent oneself through a new language.

She was a successful English writer but felt that the language constrained her at a deep psychological and artistic level. She decided to learn Italian, a language which she always had a mysterious longing for, and years later she now lives in Rome and writes only in Italian…

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who wants to restrain me? The most obvious answer is the English language. [...] For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mastered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it.

I think I felt a similar urge before, when at 24 I left France for East Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan). The sense of freedom, of escaping social determinism, was exhilarating. I had to learn Persian to operate there, and even most of my English comes from there (Pakistan is an Anglophone country). I think the move did make of me a freer person, less constrained by cultural limits.

Ever felt the urge to become somebody else, something more, a stranger to your previous self?