Accents

Once upon a time, that was a question I was asked a lot more frequently than I seem to get now.

Growing up in New England, the idea of having an accent wasn't something I understood, in no small part because everyone I knew had the same one.

Yes, I didn't pronounce R's in every word, everything was "wicked" and "fuck" is actually used as a transition between two completely independent lines of thought.

By the time I was a teenager, my accent was so thick that there was no distinction of where I came from. But being on the other side of the continent, how I talked was a target of ridicule like a lot of other things about me.

So when I was about 14, I made the conscious decision to hide it because I was ashamed of both it and where I came from.

It took years, working bit by bit every day to round out my speech patterns and learn to put the inflections in the right places. Essentially, it was going back to square one and starting to talk all over again. Being in theatre made it easier since I learned to also work with other accents and tones of voice, but in the end, it finally went away.

Nowadays, it only comes out when I talk abut home or the Red Sox and even then, it somehow feels fake. Like the voice I had when I was a kid is no longer genuine and the one I have now is supposed to be who I am.

But as the adage says, you can take the boy out of Boston, but you can't take Boston out of the boy.

In trying to find my literary voice again, I'm finding myself wanting to find my actual one as well. To be fair, it would be much easier if I was back home. As it is, that's still not an option yet, so in the meantime, I'll just have to remember how it was to say things the way I need and want to.

If I'm not supposed to be ashamed of where I came from, then I shouldn't be ashamed to say things my way.