Hilaria Baldwin is finally opening up about the accent drama that’s followed her for years — and she’s chalking it up to something much deeper than people thought.
The 41-year-old yoga instructor and mom of seven has been at the center of a long-running debate over her identity and her fluctuating Spanish accent. Internet sleuths once called her out for switching between Spanish and English, forgetting simple English words, and previously going by “Hilary.” Despite having grown up in Boston, her accent often led people to believe she was born and raised in Spain.
Now, in her new memoir Manual Not Included, Hilaria shares that her ADHD plays a big role in the mix-ups.
“When I get stuck or go off on tangents and forget what I am saying while I am saying it… If you only knew how loud it is in my brain at any given moment!” she writes. “At that point, I had not discussed any of this publicly. I just existed in a land where sometimes I spoke one language and sometimes I spoke another, sometimes I mixed them and got mixed up, and I never talked about my processing differences. I just tried to be ‘normal.’”
She recalls struggling with learning as a child, long before there was any public understanding around neurodiversity. “Growing up being neurodivergent, I had to work harder in school than many of the people around me. I never felt like I was smart in the right way,” Hilaria shares. “I am relieved that now there’s less of a stigma around differences in learning and processing.”
As she puts it, getting diagnosed changed everything. “I’m now aware that my brain just works differently and I can really succeed in the right environments and tasks,” she continues. “It’s something I’ve struggled with my entire life… I knew I had to stay active in order to function and think clearly.”
But when the internet began calling out her accent inconsistencies, things took a darker turn. “Now I know that it’s ridiculous that anyone would feel outraged or amused because someone forgot a word. Can you be honest right now, reading this: Have you ever forgotten a word?” she writes. “But back then, I started to really unravel. I was confused. I felt lost. I missed my family. I couldn’t eat. I got very thin. I started to question my sanity. I started to question if I was a good person. I returned to what I used to do as a child, and started to call myself stupid. When I woke up, I wanted to be dead. And I got worse and worse and worse.”
Through it all, her brother — who lives in Spain — helped her find some clarity.
“I’d sit on my bathroom floor, nursing my baby Edu at 3 a.m., and speak to my brother in Spain, and I’d cry to him, nauseous about it all,” she remembers. “He’d try to lighten things up by saying, ‘Can we just stop for a second and talk about how nonsensical this is? You’re speaking to me in Spain, where I’ve lived for most of my life, in Spanish, about the validity of our connection to Spain…’”
Today, she’s embracing her roots — and passing them down. “I teach my kids Spanish, we eat certain Spanish foods that I grew up eating, and these are comforts to me,” she writes.
She also highlights how accents naturally shift. “I read an amazing article… about pro soccer players… when they switch teams to a different country, it’s normal that their accents and voices and speech change and — wait for it — they forget words!”
But in her case? “It really was about a woman and her voice. Taking her voice.”
Her husband Alec Baldwin stood by her through the worst. “He’d know I was awake, and he would hold me close and say, ‘You’re not alone. I’m here and I love you…’”
Eventually, she realized: “I am mixed-up but I am not bad or broken. And then Hilaria returned.”
