My son heard my accent and asked why I used to sound different

Dear Delyara, My son found an old video from the year I immigrated. I was twenty-three, speaking English with a thick Iranian accent, laughing nervously at something off camera. He played it twice and said, “Mum, you sound completely different.” I do. Over twenty-eight years, I changed my pronunciation because people asked me to repeat myself, mocked certain words, or complimented me whenever I sounded “more American.” I never made a conscious decision to lose the accent. It disappeared by a thousand small corrections. My son asked whether I could still talk like that. I tried. It sounded fake in my own mouth. That hurt. Persian is still my first language, but even there my relatives say I sound foreign now. Migration has apparently edited both sides of my voice. Tonight, I watched the video alone. That young woman sounded frightened, hopeful, unmistakably from somewhere. I wanted to reach through the screen and tell her not to work so hard to become easy for strangers to understand. I know why she did it. I am just surprised by how much of her disappeared into being understood.