Simon Says

I'm a little amazed at how quickly I'm able to mimic people's behavior and vocal inflections. In certain academic circles this is called “code switching”. I've done this most of my life. Since Kindergarden, I've been going from a fairly working class neighborhood where I live to an extremely affluent one for school, then back again in the evening. In each place I behaved some what differently.
In the Disney movies The Jungle Book and Tarzan there are scenes of Mowgli and Tarzan learning to speak like an animals and humans, respectively. That's how I feel. I never really took note of it until last year when I did it again for a field work assignment in which I traveled from school, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation, to my field placement, to one of the poorest in West Philly. It made me extremely aware that I severely compartmentalized my life in order to maintain my mimicry. Keeping things separated made it easier to identify their key characteristics and embody them. In high school, I never had friends from school over to my house, not because I was ashamed of where I lived or how my family was but because I wasn't sure how I was supposed to behave. Was it a school or a home moment?
I'm glad to say, I'm much more confident with myself now. I know how to behave and when and it isn't usually based on mimicry. I'm able to be myself (now that I know what that is) and decompartmentalize the different spheres of my life and alow people into all of it. I do still, however, tend to speak the way the people around me speak. This includes accents and turns of phrase. While I was abroad, I definitely caught myself using an English accent once or twice. Now, I sound a lot like a friend I've been spending a lot of time with. I guess old habits die hard.