For every moment of imposter syndrome I have about my Japanese fluency, even despite the fact that I live in this country and am surrounded by it, whenever I have to message someone about something complicated or perform a task like assembling furniture and the instructions are all in Japanese, once it's all over, I often end up taking a mild step back and both: 1. kind of marvel I went from NO Japanese whatsoever at 18 to doing business and rebuilding my entire life from scratch in it in a little under 15 years, and 2. feel so much relief that even if my Japanese isn't perfect—and believe me, it has its weak spots; I'm just generally good enough to work around them these days—how much easier things are to navigate on the whole using what Japanese I do have. It's not that being a Japanese-speaking foreigner here is a breeze by any means even with that, but it's just genuinely hard to fathom how some other people have to navigate the system without the benefit of even that much when it's rarely designed with even the faintest consideration of them in mind.
I live in a very urban area and I'm only really a few train stops away from where foreigners are much more plentiful, but it's still detached enough from those sorts of population centers that it's not uncommon for people who talk to me for the first time to express relief that I can actually converse with them in Japanese, even if it's not always perfect. It's happened a lot while getting some minor dental and medical stuff sorted out the last several months and I've been shuffling around to different places; from what I gather, those sorts of facilities here are largely used to dealing with Korean and Chinese people at most when it comes to non-Japanese patients, so people are often understandably on pins and needles a little when they see my 6'1" tall white ass walk through the door. That I'm making it work in a place like this and that people are able to engage with me without feeling the need to pepper in English once they know I'm a translator and stuff should really be enough to convince myself that I'm doing okay, all things considered. There might still be room for improvement in some ways, which I'll get to eventually once I really have the time and energy for it (my 2022 was a very tiring year to do that move and 2023 has been largely spent mentally recuperating from that), but it's not nothing, either.
One of these days the emotional half of my brain will agree with the rational one.
One of these days.