No One Understands Me

No one understands me  :-/
Like - literally. I just started my day here at work, and I've already had 2 customers so far, who speak American English, who cannot understand MY American English. I was born and raised in Missouri and Illinois, so it's not like I have a foreign accent. I could understand THEM just fine.

I WOULD say that maybe I'm just tired and my words aren't being pronounced very clearly, but then someone who actually DOES have an accent will call in, and they can seem to understand me just fine, so I don't think I'm not speaking clearly enough. And I'm having to repeat myself so I'm pronouncing every word clearly and precisely, so maybe they're just older customers and I'm talking too fast? I don't know...

This isn't the first time I've had trouble with people not understanding me. When I first moved to this town of Perryville, I had people say to me that they could tell I wasn't from around here because of my 'accent'. I was confused. What accent? I had only just moved one town over. But even on VRchat before, I had someone ask where I was from, and when I said "Missouri", he was like - well THAT explains it. Explains what? Missouri is pretty much the middle of the US. Is it the meeting of the North and South that is throwing people off?

Then I wonder if maybe it has to do with all the different accents I've been around over the past years. I have talked to many people from many different areas of the world, and there is also quite a diversity in my own family. I have friends in the UK that I've been talking to since about 2002. Then there's the time I was obsessed with New Zealand. My first boyfriend was half Mexican. My bosses at work for almost 10 years were from India. In my family, there are a some Filipino people, and at one point in my teenage years, we lived in "the deep" which was the area of town where we said words like "fiddy" instead of "fifty" and "prolly" instead of "probably". Maybe the merging of all these things has influenced me to acquire a unique diction?

Not sure... but regardless, it was something I think about often when people comment on the way I talk, so I wanted to discuss my thoughts about it here.