I learned to talk like them, then stopped talking

I moved to a big city college from a town where the English I spoke was correct and nobody's business. Within a month I understood that correct was not the currency. The currency was speed, and slang, and a specific way of pronouncing things with the ends cut off, and being able to name a band when a band came up.

So I set about acquiring it. I want to be fair to myself here: I did not decide to become someone else. I did what anyone does in a new place, which is to pick up the accent of the room. But I did it the way you study for an exam. I wrote things down. I asked a hostel-mate to explain a phrase and then used it four times in one evening to make sure I had the timing right. I practised ordering the coffee that everyone ordered, even though I found it bitter, because ordering it was the point.

It worked. That is the honest middle of this story: it worked. By the end of second year I had a group, a table we sat at, jokes that were mine. Nobody ever asked where I was from. That was the thing I thought I wanted.

Then one evening, in a flat with six people and a bad speaker, someone said, what about you, where are you from originally. And I heard myself answer, and the answer was a city I had visited twice, delivered in a flattened accent, followed by a joke that got a laugh. It was maybe two seconds. But I caught the sound of it from the outside, the way you catch your voice on a recording, and I went cold in a warm room.

I stopped talking much after that. Not as a protest. I simply found that every sentence now had to be checked first, and the checking was exhausting, and so the easiest thing was to say less. The group did not notice for weeks, and then someone asked if I was upset about something, and I said I was tired, and that was the end of it. By the end of that year I had two friends and no table.

Here is the part I would tell the version of myself who studied the slang: I do not think the disguise was the mistake. Some of that language is mine now, genuinely mine, and I use it without thinking. The mistake was believing that acceptance was a test I had to keep passing. Once you frame it that way, every conversation is an exam and you are always one wrong word from being found out. Nobody can rest inside that.

What I do now is smaller and better. When I do not follow something, I say I do not follow it, explain. I say it plainly, without a joke attached to soften it. The first few times it cost me something in my chest. Some people did find it slow going. Two did not, and those two are the ones I call.

The accent comes and goes now, depending on who I am on the phone with, which I have decided is not a lie but just how language works. But I have stopped performing upward. If someone at a table thinks less of me for how I say a word, they have told me something useful about the table, and I know where the door is.