I like the North Florida Southern accent, my native accent. I think it’s pretty and its argot evocative. Consciously discarding it, though, helped me in my career and in my life but I hate that I had to.

People like me — we code switchers, we dwellers in two worlds — gain a lot from the mainstream world by embracing it and denying parts of ourselves others see as distasteful or louche. But it comes at a cost, a constantly-paid price of suppression of deep parts of one’s self that can only be subdued and not excised, that are always there under the surface that if they slip through immediately brand one as of the wrong class, from the wrong place.

I have ambivalent feelings towards my natal land, obviously. Some of the worst and best experiences of my life happened there. Certainly almost all of my formative ones. I love large parts of it. I hate large parts of it. This is just the way it is. Has a home ever been to one degree or another not a prison in some sense, though?

In North Florida once as an adult with my partner, I went to a dock projecting out into Ocean Pond, 80 feet of rought wood jutting out among cypress and lily pads. There was a man on the dock fishing. I talked to him about North Florida fishing holes only once- and former-denizens would know, sharing tips and jawing about what any two old fisher people talk about and probably have for the last 100,000 years.

My partner who typically is more loquacious than I am wasn’t really saying a word. It wasn’t until later that I realized that she hadn’t really understood anything he’d said. He with his deep and sonorous North Florida patois was evading any interpretations of hers; she had not parsed enough to make sense of anything. This of course was my native accent. I didn’t even realize.

Later, though — as if there not a million other confirmations — as she said that she thought the North Florida accent was lovely, I knew I’d found the right one.