I’d say part of this is the intended / official descriptipn isn’t actually that. The spoken word existed first, then someone tried to capture that spoken word using a finite list of characters and character combinations that map back to phenomes. The written word isn’t phonetically accurate to the letters it is composed of, and the written word is just close approximation of the spoken word itself.

Yeah, as I said my awareness is just “people make fun of my accent some times” (and I make fun right back, it’s that kind of a friend group).