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Re-inventing yourself

Zazie dans le Metro

12:43 / 17.10.02

Am I a totally fake and phoney person, if I decide to re-invent myself? By which I mean shaking off the shackles of a closeted upbringing with limited cultural influences? By which I mean if I choose to lose my strong Northern regional accent, for no other reason than because I just hate the grating sound of it?

The person I feel I have become is completely unrecognisable from the child and teen who plodded through life, too scared to say or do what I really wanted, for fear of having shit kicked out of me by my "peers"...for instance, my old friends from my old stomping ground would have thought me a freak if I told them I prefer to visit galleries and museums rather than drink myself into projectile-vomit filled booze-fest at the local meat market...In no way am I ashamed of who or where I come from, but live in morbid fear of being seen as a sort of Guy Ritchie-style mockney twat for rejecting that world.

Someone else's perspective on this would be appreciated...I am new to Barbelith so forgive the rather inarticulate post...it's my first time.

yawn - thing's buddy

14:56 / 17.10.02

Without wanting to sound like a crap hippy I don't think you've even undergone a re-invention:
you're being yourself,(wo)man.
You always liked galleries etc, so you go see pictures inim. We're always changing, responding to environments, people, food,
drugs, facts, rumours, dreams, love and other things too.

I remember Grant Morrison (you know this guy, yeah?) slagging off those who had no time for pretension. What's wrong with pretending anyway? It's a fictional interaction with reality: suit to fit.

Take heart from more of his paraphrased words:

The more cameras they put on us, the more we act; as surveillance increases, so does chaos.

Guy Ritchie: yeah, he's a tosser but I don't think he's done anything 'wrong': he's created a world he wanted to live in.

And so should you.

nice name by the way.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:04 / 17.10.02

Just be who you feel you are. And change as seems appropriate.

autopilot disengaged

15:07 / 17.10.02

yeah.

(very) basically, you have a choice. define yrself by yr actions, or fall back on some old habit of who you feel you are/were/whatever and allow that to rule you.

if you drop the essentialist ideas of an unchanging, monolithic identity, you can have fun playing round ...and exploring all the different people you can be - regardless of the past.

which is noo age theoryspeak for: just do it.

yay.

15:12 / 17.10.02

Accents are symbolic in lots of ways, and your own speech is very personal, so it can be a powerful symbol to yourself of your own change. Don't get too hung up about it either way, though... in the end, it's a symbol not what it represents.

15:27 / 17.10.02

The best aphorism I read relating to this was on this very board; somebody quoting a drag queen, I think:

"The closer you get to matching your dreams, the truer you are to yourself."

Or summat like that. In other words, don't forget to include your desires, ambitions etc in the list of things that make you, um, you.

pointless and uncalled for

12:02 / 18.10.02

I find myself undergoing change about once every five years. I think it's like a natural coccooning that we repeatedly do. Some people create small ones, others bigger. We wrap ourselves up in the routines and comforts of the familiar until some abstract gland kicks in and demands that we shed our covers and diaplay a brand new shiny set of wings.

This is far less what I would consider re-invention of the self and more acceptance of a reality and self-development. It's not pretension of phoneyness, in fact I see it as quite the opposite.

Reinvention to me is more of a state of temporary fakery because it seeks to become something that we currently are not. May be you wish to be (which is not to bad really) or maybe you want to reap the benefits, such as marketability or social acceptance (entirely fucking shaloow if I may be so harsh)

Bottom line - do what you want to do, be at your most happy and comfortable, never lie to yourself.

21:50 / 18.10.02

I'm thinking that dropping the history, and its attendant hints on living is completely appropriate. I learned how to be/act from my society, my family, and friends. A lot of who I was being was an act I used to fit in; get approval. As an adult who approves of myself I now have the freedom to do and be who I want to please me. Go for it!

Tryphena Absent

00:33 / 19.10.02

My housemate's from Stoke, her grandad's always having a go at her for losing her accent, like it's something she can avoid. When you move to another part of the country you pick up a way of speaking that's different because the people around you aren't talking the way they always did before. You just evolve so you could let it carry on naturally... that's assuming you aren't in the same area as you were and I kind of got the feeling you'd moved?

I don't think it's necessarily healthy to push your past away but then it's not healthy to keep it too close either. There's a balance there somewhere but I sure as fuck don't know it.

Raymond Queneau

The resistable rise of Reidcourchie

09:23 / 20.10.02

There's been a number of periods in my life where I've though re-inventing myself would be a good idea but I can never quite sustain it. I tend to find I change the most when I'm not paying attention.

And now I have antenna, which is cool.

15:27 / 20.10.02

So, it's just the accent you're worried about? Well, you could profess a belief in the convention that the use of long vowels, i.e., R.P., is not in fact a regional accent, but is the correct way to speak English. Which, indeed, it is. Just ask a public-school Scot or a returned U.S. exchange student. They speak it. As do I. (And it is certainly not, as tedious northern nationalists would claim, "cockney".)

Just aim somewhere between "nauth and sithe" and "nawf an' saaf", neither plummy nor slack, and you won't go far wrong. For the love of God, don't drop your 'T's, or you will end up against the wall next to Ritchie and Oliver.

It's not shallow. How many of us speak in the same way as we were taught? All of us are guilty of some affectation, including sprinkling our conversation with the 'F' word to make ourselves sound more "street." You will, of course, sound like a weather forecaster. But you may get some extra cash doing voice-overs for local cinema ads, and will break your remaining ties with the Yates's Wine Lodge crowd forever.

pointless and uncalled for

09:12 / 21.10.02

Day before yesterday my dad delivered some boxes of stuff that I had left with my parents before moving to Canada more than three and a half years ago. I opened them late yesterday to discover many things I had forgotten about myself. Books, vinyl, letters from friends and so on.

My god if you think I'm an eejit now, you should have seen me then. Frankly it's frightening but at least I'm making progress.

12:40 / 21.10.02

It takes a while to work out what you want to do, what will make you happy. Don't worry about it - as long as you can see what you want, (and why - that's quite important) then just follow what you want to do.