I was bullied when I was at school. Not really for anything, and not particularly seriously. I also like to think that it wasn't in a way which has severely affected me later on; that I'm still successful and confident and that actually if anything it was people who I considered friends that let me down and hurt me more than people who used to call me a 'loser' when I was 14. In that I suppose I was lucky, because that's all they did, no one beat me up, no one picked out a physical attribute to make me insecure about, they just laughed at me and thought I was a bit weird. At the time I thought it was the worst thing in the world and I cried a lot, in retrospect it's made me very sensitive to other people's feelings and given me the ability to laugh at myself. Other people still laugh at me too, and now I practically encourage it.
My point is that even after I left school I didn't really know what it was like to have someone pick on something really specific and make me feel uncomfortable about it. Not until I went to a very small university in the South West with my incredibly soft northern accent did I have that experience. I'd love to say that more than anything it was just boring, that four years after arriving at Bath I just rolled my eyes when someone paused to imitate my accent back at me. But it wasn't just boring, it was frustrating and at some points very isolating.
I appreciate that it doesn't sound like a big deal, and I don't bring it up often just because of that. That being said this is my space on the internet and if I want to get angry about something then I can. So here it is: when people make fun of my accent it really pisses me off. Mostly because even four years down the line no one seemed to have guessed that maybe I might be a little bored of hearing about it, and whilst it might have been meant in friendly jest 90% of the time it sometimes struggled to come across like that around 50% of the time. That's mostly because by and large it was just aimed at me. There are, sadly unsurprisingly, very few people from the north of England at the University of Bath. That's fine, I didn't move there to be surrounded by northern people, that wasn't what I expected to need to have to feel comfortable or to make friends. I made friends and mostly I felt increasingly at home. Until someone commented on my voice, and then I felt very far from home and anything but comfortable.
The thing about my voice is that there's very little I can do about it. It was formed through years of social interaction and at age 22 I'd say it was probably here to stay. In that sense it's much like my appearance in that it's an integral part of who I am but I have basically no control over it. So when someone makes fun of it, or suggests that I pronounce stuff wrong, I tend to feel much as I imagine you would if someone made fun of your physical appearance. I feel pretty rubbish but also pretty personally aggrieved because it doesn't really feel like a fair game. It's not fair because those people were surrounded by other people who sounded just like them, hence noticing I sounded different. But I spent 18 years surrounded by people who spoke just like me and I still managed to keep it together when I moved somewhere else. I was more than aware that there were people with accents other than mine and that they had just as much a right to be okay with their speech as I did with mine.
The only difference was I was out on my own, I very rarely heard anyone speak back to me in a voice that held any familiarity, and that probably wouldn't have been so bad if it didn't also come coupled with the suggestion that there was something fundamentally 'not as good' about my accent.
It never really let up and looking back I never really suggested that it annoyed me. It took coming home and realising how much of a toll the experience had taken on me to realise how much I never ever want to deal with that again. I have no interest in being told that I pronounce things 'wrong', I also have no interest in being told the 'correct' word for something which I happen to have a different word for because of where I learnt to speak. I also have no interest in being told I'd be 'attractive if it wasn't for your voice', which is insulting and demeaning in a number of different ways that I can't even be bothered to go into here.
I do however, have every interest in continuing to express myself in my own voice and trying to reverse the audible 'softening' of my accent that has taken place. My accent doesn't get stronger when I'm angry or tired, I just stop sub-consciously trying to hide it. The fact that, instead of expressing my discomfort, I just slowly adapted my voice, just because it was easier, has to be the saddest part of this whole thing. I let people make me feel like the way I express myself, that the way I am wasn't good enough and that I should change it; that is absolutely the worst thing I've ever heard.
xx
No comments:
Post a Comment