I Spent Years Hiding My Accent and Lost a Part of Myself

I arrived in London from Karachi at 22 for a master's programme and I spent the first month doing something I was not quite conscious of initially - monitoring and adjusting my accent in professional and academic settings to be closer to what I heard around me. It was not a deliberate campaign.

It was the accumulated small decisions of someone who had identified, very quickly, that the specific sound of their voice marked them as from elsewhere in ways that changed how rooms responded to them before they had finished their first sentence.

The adjustments were modest and produced results that I found, in a complicated way, both useful and destabilising. I was taken more seriously in seminars when I sounded less distinctly Pakistani. I received less of the particular kind of polite impatience that I had noticed accompanying my original cadence. The performance worked, professionally.

What it was doing to me personally was something I only understood later. I was 24 and in a job I had worked hard to get, presenting to a client, when I caught myself mid-sentence making an adjustment I had made a hundred times before - pulling a vowel toward a sound it was not naturally - and felt, in that moment, a specific and quiet shame that was not about the accent but about the performance.

I was erasing something to be acceptable in a room that had not asked me to erase it. When I told a Pakistani colleague about this she laughed with a recognition that told me she had the same experience, and then said something that I have thought about since: that her accent was the sound of her grandmother and her childhood street and the city she came from, and she had decided it was not something a job should be able to rename.

I did not change overnight. The adjustment reflex took months to unlearn and sometimes still surfaces. But I stopped treating my original voice as a problem to be managed and started treating it as something I was allowed to have in every room I entered. The professional world did not end.

Several people have told me since that they find the accent distinctive in a way they mean warmly. The version of me that sounds most like myself is, it turns out, easier to be.