I learned to talk on the south shore of Long Island, an area with a pretty marked accent. My name used to be Pawlie, and I liked chawklit and kawfee and loved my dawgs.
But then I moved to Colorado for my Master’s degree, and the people in the English Department there -- my colleagues, mind you, people you might think would have been more open to linguistic diversity -- were pretty condescending about how I talked. And the shame I felt drove that accent out of me in a very short time. When I went home for Thanksgiving that fall, just a few short months later, the accent was pretty much gone.
I hadn’t realized I was doing it at the time, but in those few weeks I had fundamentally changed the way I talked in order to fit in — or more precisely, in order to not stand out, which is different, and a more accurate way of describing my motivation.
But once you lose an accent, it’s gone. And a piece of your identity disappears with it. I can fake it, of course, but it’s not me anymore, and that is a sad thing to say. It’s a way of being in the world that is now lost to me, no longer available.
If I had known better at the time, if I had been more critically aware, if I had known what the larger stakes were, if I had known what giving up my accent was going to cost me in the long run, I would have fought to keep it, retain it. But I didn't.
Losing my accent opened doors for me, no doubt, but it closed doors as well. It’s 34 years later, and I am clearly still bitter about it.