The Plight of a Kind-Of International Student
The toils and strife of having three passports. 
Illustration: Sydney Hanson
On September 2nd, 2004, I was born to my parents and three older sisters in Cambridge, England. Nine months later, my dad accepted a job offer in a place on the West Coast of Canada called Vancouver. We packed up our small townhouse in Cambridge and hopped on that 9-hour flight from London to Vancouver, and have lived there ever since. And God, do I wish the rest was history.
From the time we moved until kindergarten, I had learned to talk around my family, all of whom have British accents. So, I learned to speak in a British accent. Neighbourhood kids I played with never seemed to notice the fact that I sounded completely different to them - at least that was my impression. Then, when I first got to school and opened my mouth with a ‘posh’ British accent while all of the other Canadian kids gave me blank stares, I think I understood for the first time that I was an outsider in that environment. Granted, there are much worse ways to be ostracized in school at a young age - having a British accent amongst Canadians is hardly a devastating battle. But small interactions start to add up over time, such as when kids simply don’t understand and say, “why do you sound like that?” or when the boys in your class are looking to annoy one of the girls, and the easiest target is to chant “tea and crumpets!” over again at you. Looking back, I have to commend them – it is pretty funny.
Of course, if you hear me in a conversation with my Canadian friends now, you would never know I wasn’t actually from here. I have come to sound exactly like them. This has become an entirely separate problem of its own. I have no benchmark for when it happened or how I managed it, but over time, I slowly began to code-switch in different environments. For those who may be unaware: code-switching is the act of changing the way you speak to fit the regional dialect. I’m a hypochondriac, so when I found out I do this, I had to do some extensive research to find out if I was going crazy or not (the jury’s still out). Whether I wanted to or not, I began to speak in a Canadian accent at school, and a British accent at home with family. The day I finally realized what I was doing, my head spun. I worried if I was becoming a serial liar about my identity, and if so, which one was the lie.
When I first got to university, I decided I’d had enough with the mental gymnastics around which accent I was supposed to use and how many people would call me a psychopath identity thief based on which one I used. I decided that no, my first words were in my British accent, and I would stick to that at university. It’ll make me interesting, right? (No. Find a hobby.) Well, fortunately, or unfortunately for me, that tactic didn’t last long. For whatever reason, when I talk with Canadian people, I just cannot fathom staying in my British accent, even if it is the accent I learned to talk in and the accent I am so comfortable in around family. Almost out of my control, my words would just slip into Canadian pronunciation, like my subconscious was playing some fun “sike” trick on me in the thick of frosh week. I mean, you try saying ‘water’ in a British accent in front of a group of Canadian people and not look like an absolute twat. This got me wondering again if maybe I was just meant to be Canadian, and I was just ‘pretending’ to be British to fit in with my family. I mean, I moved here when I was less than a year old and have lived here ever since. By that logic, I’m about as British as a bottle of maple syrup. And yet, rejecting that part of me and just accepting that I was fully Canadian still felt wrong.
If you have made it to this point, I commend you for putting up with my first-world complaints. I promise there is a core to this issue. After many, many years of consideration and debates back and forth with myself I have finally decided that I am neither. And I am also both. See, with the constant cycle of push and pull I have had with myself, I eventually figured I would have to meet somewhere in the middle so as not to make my head explode. With this, I came to understand that I don’t have to be one thing, and neither do you. I can be British and Canadian by proxy if I want to, while still acknowledging the code-switch of both. If we really want to go there, I’m also half Portuguese and a quarter Irish. The point is, if you want to be some undecided medley of conflicting personality traits, you absolutely can be. If your brain short-circuited at some point in your developmental stage leading to you having two accents, then I say the more the merrier. Humans do this funny thing where we feel we have to put labels on everything for it to make sense (“label theory”, ask your friends in psych!) If something defies the simplistic label we so wish to give it, then it must be a fault in the system. This is severely untrue. We are some of the smartest beings on this planet, we are allowed to feel new and contrasting things and be many different versions of ourselves that feel right. Otherwise, we stay static. We never create, we never inspire, and we never inquire as to what else about us is intriguing.
So, to all of my friends who - like me - are a confusing mix of stuff, don’t stop. Just because people make fun of your accent, or you don’t know what accent to have, that doesn’t mean either identity is worth any less. It’s fine with me if you go your whole life being undecided. What matters is liking whatever version of yourself you are comfortable with, not adapting to fit others’ needs. Some things are best left as mysteries, and you can let yourself be one of them. That’s all for now. If you need me, I’ll be inventing my own language so I don’t have to deal with this issue anymore. English is overrated anyway.