My Accent

Firoozeh Dumas goes through the hardship she experienced when she was a new immigrant through her name. I can relate to this not because of my name but because of my accent. 

Lets face it, my accent was the most cringe in the whole class. There were others with accents but they weren't nearly as bad as mine. I moved to Troy when I was 5 (still developing language and speech). Learning English during this time was especially as hard because of that, and I would refrain form socializing or playing with other kids because it all involved speaking English, something I wasn't good at yet. 

I could start to tell that people didn't like spending time with me because of my accent in 2nd grade. There were a few other Indians in my class, most of them wore the same clothes and had the same backpack aesthetic as me. Everything was the same except the accent. This drove my confidence and morale down by a lot. I would play on the swings and monkey bars by myself most of the time.

In third grade, I finally met another girl with an accent. I was really excited because there weren't as many Indian immigrants before 2014 (only about 8% of the school would be Indian whereas now its about 60% I think). We made tones of Indian jokes, talked about our favorite food, worked on every project together. She gave me a sense of belonging even though we were the only Indians in that class. She left to go back to India that same year, and by that time my accent was gone. I was still left alone because people remembered me with the accent and I was still a little weird. It wasn't until middle school that I got another chance to make good friends because Morse fed its students to Baker and Boulan, and I was one of 5 other kids going to Boulan that year. 

I did miss out on a lot of opportunities because I wasn't willing to speak too much to my teachers or classmates. Most of them never got to know what kind of person I was and so they never told me about things I was interested in. I never did Science Olympiad or Math club or any other clubs at Elementary school that I would've liked or my parents would have appreciated. My parents didn't know much about it either since they were also adjusting to the system here. It was at the end of 5th grade when I realized this and I started making more efforts in middle school to speak more to people and teachers. I ended up doing track and cross country all three years, because of this and I couldn't be happier.

Now for the memes: