Your accent, your roots, your weird laugh. That’s not baggage. That’s your signature.

Flattening yourself to sound like everyone around you is usually learned early, often right after somebody turned where you are from into a joke. The flattening costs more than it saves. Those markers are the shortest route anyone has to recognizing you, and there is nothing underneath them that would count as an improvement.

Stop correcting one of them this week. The word you say the way your family says it, the laugh you cut short, the story you normally leave out. People relax around someone who is not editing, and it is considerably less tiring at your end.