‘My Brain Just Works Differently’

The reality star was born in Spain and says she spent holidays there, but she didn’t grow up there.

As such, accent-gate became a whole thing as people tried to make sense of why she would speak with a Spanish accent, struggle to think of the English word for “cucumber” while on the Today show, and other odd comments that would seem to suggest she is a foreign citizen in the United States — if she grew up in Massachusetts.

“I spent some of my childhood in Boston, some of my childhood in Spain,” she explained in a social media post shortly after the whole brouhaha erupted. “My family, my brother, my parents, my nephew, everybody is over there in Spain now [while] I’m here.”

But, as it turns out, her parents hadn’t moved there until she was 27 years old, making the waters even murkier. And that conversation has never died down.

Now, in her just released memoir, Manual Not Included, Hilaria is offering a medical explanation for why her accent seems to shift from American to Spanish to some hybrid in-between.

“I have ADHD and dyslexia,” The Baldwins star wrote, in an excerpt shared by Page Six. “And these greatly impact my speech, my reading, my listening, my focus, my memory and my self-confidence.”

She explained, “My brain just works differently.”

The reality star writes that its the varying influences throughout her life that come through in the way she talks. “I have a brain that is one part English, one part Spanish, seven dollops of mom brain, a heavy pour of distraction when I get stuck or go off on tangents and forget what I am saying while I am saying it,” she wrote.

“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,” she added, noting that she’s never before discussed “any of this publicly.”

She also said that the intense and lengthy backlash her family has had to endure these past five years was hard on her.

“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,” she wrote.

“I returned to what I used to do as a child, and started to call myself stupid,” the book continues. “When I woke up, I wanted to be dead. And I got worse and worse and worse.”

The former yoga instructor praised husband Alec for helping her to get through the toughest times, writing that he was “so good to me throughout this time,” which she thinks was in part because he could relate to what she was going through.

“He had experienced similar situations: people saying awful things about him, trying to destroy him, making others think he was a bad person,” she wrote. “He could reach out from a place of real empathy and personal experience.”

Hilaria also opened up about how the controversy has impacted her on her reality show, in which she stars alongside her famous husband. In the premiere episode, she confessed, “I’d be lying if I said [the controversy] didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.”

“But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places and realize that we are a mix of all these different things,” she continued, “and that’s going to have an impact on how we sound and an impact on how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms.”

“That’s normal,” Hilaria added. “That’s called being human.”