Whenever I listen to a recording of my voice, I am always shocked. That is not me, I think.

In my head I have no accent. I like to imagine I am self-created, aloof, and that I sprung from a vacuum. If my thoughts have an accent, they are more Queen Elizabeth than Honey Boo Boo. But my speech gives me away: I grew up in the Deep South.

I was born in South Carolina, where I lived for most of my life until I moved to Florida about a year ago, but I often find myself wanting to distance myself from my home state because while I was there, I changed.

That is, I discarded many of the conservative beliefs my family and most of the kids I grew up with still embrace. In a state that has been called the Buckle of the Bible Belt, I have been an agnostic since I was 15.

I also support gay marriage, find the death penalty barbaric, and think that Fox News is a parody of itself. The idea of “intelligent design” being taught in schools alongside evolution offends the rational empiricist in me.

I sometimes think my upbringing has shaped me mainly through my struggles to define myself against it.

During my childhood it was different. There was a sense of being enclosed and it was not all bad. At family holiday gatherings there was a feeling of closeness and good-humored warmth. Before the meal, family members gathered and held hands as someone led a prayer.

There was a sense of security concentrated inside the circle of linked hands, familiarity within, uncertainty without. After I jettisoned my religious beliefs, I felt cut off from that experience. I was secretly outside the circle, and no one knew.

In silence I was always disagreeing with those around me. In 1999 I moved to Atlanta, a city that was far more liberal. I saw the contrast culturally and intellectually to my conservative home town and I met people who saw the world in much the same way I did.

While there I felt adventurous and became a vegetarian. After a year of living in Atlanta, the Dot com bubble crash ravaged the job market and my husband and I moved back to my home town.

I was alarmed at how homogenized it was, how pale the faces were. It was a place where church was the dominant topic of conversation, and where people thought being a vegetarian meant you mainly ate chicken.

I stubbornly retained my new diet as long as I could.

Like vegetarians, atheists and agnostics in my home town were not so much reviled as unacknowledged. I have heard on the news stories about atheists getting fired for their skepticism or penalized in other ways, but I never saw that happen where I lived.

I never saw anyone abused for being an atheist because it was so rare for an atheist to admit to being one. Thus, everyone was free to believe whatever they wanted to about them.

For the most part, this belief was the one I was taught as a child: that atheists were near-mythical creatures who inhabited a dark and humorless realm of seething cruelty and unhappiness. The common assumption was that unless you had cruelty written all over your face, you must be a Christian.

After Atlanta, my home town had never seemed so constricting or so wrong-minded. On every block, it seemed, there was a church with a sign that said something like, “Hot enough for you? Hell is far hotter! Better start praying!” or “Heaven or hell: You choose!”

On every street the war of the bumper stickers raged on, declaring the evils of “Darwinism” or proclaiming “God, guns, country” or showing a “Jesus fish” eating a Darwin fish.

Seeing these kinds of proclamations everywhere made me want to to tell the people around me that things were not as simple as they assumed. A perfect storm of adolescent depression and religious confusion had prompted my induction into rational skepticism, and since then, everything I learned seemed to confirm that I was right to doubt my childhood beliefs.

But I did not think I was articulate enough to circumvent the years of indoctrination I remembered from my own childhood.

My suspicion appeared true; trying to explain my position to my parents always ended in terrible frustration. Though I loved them, I often felt infringed upon, silenced, and repressed by repeated attempts to bring me back “into the fold.”

A little over a year ago a financial crisis culminated in my move to Florida. Living here has lifted some of the pressure to conform. While Florida is geographically south of my home state, it is not “the Deep South” culturally.

Though politically conservative, Florida does not assume prescribed beliefs or affiliations. Ocala, where I now live is more ethnically and culturally diverse than the town I left. There are not just Christians here; there are Scientologists, Jews, agnostics, atheists, and Mormons. It is simply impractical to assume everyone has the same lifestyle or believes the same things.

Thus, I have felt more comfortable about discussing my agnosticism in my blog than I was before I moved here.

Moving has offered other advantages. Like viewing the earth from the moon, being away from my home town has granted some perspective. From a safe distance, I can remember what I enjoyed about living there as well as what I did not.

I remember small things, like how much I loved the macaroni and cheese and sweet tea that my grandmother made, and how she was quick to refill the glasses even if I had only taken one sip.

For a long while I could not seem to find any place that served authentically southern macaroni. I missed it, a sort of casserole of noodles, butter and cheese with a crust baked brown on top.

While I have rejected southern conservatism, I am more aware of being from South Carolina than I was when I lived there. I know that my craving for sweet tea is not universal. And it is relatively rare to hear true southern accents where I live, so I am far more aware of my own.

At times I want to disown it. I am horrified at some of the things South Carolina does politically.

At the same time, I resent stereotypes that it is a state full of Honey Boo Boos, drawling politicians, and uneducated buffoons. Like my dad, who was a college professor, there is a robust educated population whose members are rarely represented in television and movies. Moreover, there are many liberals in South Carolina in towns like Columbia and Charleston, although they are exceedingly rare in my home town.

Whether I like it or not, being away from Deep South culture has made me feel like more of a southerner, and I am sometimes astonished that my background affects me as much as it does.

But maybe I should not be. A place known for intolerance of minorities is also the place where I took my first steps, tasted ice cream for the first time, got my first crush, and read my first book. It is where most of my family still live, and despite differences of religious and political opinions, I miss them.

By moving to Florida I have left my past behind but, like a sad, abandoned puppy, it has followed me here. It should be no surprise. It was by reacting to and reacting against my home town that I have become who I am. As a result, there will always be the tell-tell sign of my accent, a vocal wavering, a trace of history that resonates through centuries.

From the chorus of my own accent and the unfamiliar accents all around me, I see how much a geographic location can shape the minds and habits of those who live there. But in order to fully understand how much, I had to leave my home state.

I did, and from only two state borders away, I have discovered something I once dreamed about: the freedom to exist as I really am, and not as I am expected to be.