Identity

I recently watched a documentary called Hillbilly, which was about a young filmmaker returning to her hometown in Kentucky to examine the roots of the stereotype, and how the people of Appalachia and the natural resources of the region have been exploited over a long period of time. It opened some thoughts for me, and I've tried twice to write this post because it's a rabbit hole I'm easily lost in.

Throughout my childhood and most of my adulthood, I was deeply embarrassed to have grown up in Arkansas. There were, of course, the jokes about hillbillies--people who had no education, couldn't afford nice clothes or shoes or tell the sexual difference between a farm animal, a child, or a cousin, and were camouflaged by the dirt they were always covered in. I knew those jokes from a young age, and sometimes I told them. 

When my parents divorced, my mom moved my brother and me to live with her parents in the home they had retired to in Arkansas. We went from living in a nice home where I had my own room to being crammed into a 500 square foot house with 4 other people. We had to manage things like a shallow well that dried up in the summer and froze in the winter (necessitating a conservative bathing schedule at the kitchen sink,) making food and clothes last as long as possible and making ad hoc repairs to things in the house that weren't quite up to code. My grandparents' experiences with surviving the Great Depression were why we did that well. 

As a child, my identity was wrapped up in the changes in my environment, and it created a sense of being trapped that I fought as hard as I could. I paid close attention to the difference in my northern Illinois twang and the Arkansas drawl of the people I went to school with so that I could make sure I never sounded like they did. I took exceptional pride in my reading ability so I would get in the top reading group class every year through junior high. I only sought to socialize with the kids who had the ability to get out of that place after high school. When my mom started dating my stepfather, I never gave him a chance to be part of our family, because he and his family resembled those awful stereotypes I was fighting so hard to stay separate from. 

As an adult, I made sure to say that I was FROM Illinois, that I was just forced to live in Arkansas for 11 years. I had a hair trigger for any suggestion that I was stupid (still working on that one actually.) I was nervous and meticulous about my hygiene. My manners and my accent were all midwestern--no hint I had ever been across the Mason-Dixon line. I made myself worldly in the things I read and sought out in the cities I lived in, far away from the southern United States. 

Things started to change for me when I found out about Julia "Butterfly" Hill. She was a young woman who climbed into a redwood tree named Luna in California to keep it from being cut down, and I admired her grit deeply. When she came out of that tree she had lived in for 2 years, she did some interviews, and I learned that she had grown up poor in Arkansas. It was like hearing that information opened a window in my brain that breathable air could enter. A few years later, I found a love of Ben Nichols' song writing and his brother Jeff's movie making, and I started thinking about the many, many moments of my childhood that weren't traumatic. The images in my memories that had been dark--black and white--began to show some color. I remembered the many sun rises I watched from my school bus windows while riding through the country side and the way the evening glow retired behind the Ozark foothills. I remembered making leaf forts in my grandparents' yard in the fall with my brother, how the autumn chill felt so good after a long, hot summer. 

In 2008, I reconnected to some of the people I had grown up with and happily discovered over time that there was no one in my formative years who hated me, as I had irrationally felt they did, simply because they didn't pay much attention to me. Turns out, everyone was just living their own life, growing up and trying to figure out who they were. I felt the chains of my own locking break free, and I started to talk about Arkansas in a different way, one that was much more charitable and less prone to really mean jokes.

As I've said before, I am in recovery from issues I've had with substance abuse. One of the things I do as part of that recovery is write about the resentments I've carried with me throughout my life. The idea is that once I can identify a resentment fully, I can begin the process of letting it go. I can tell you two things about this process: it was really, really hard to accept this work as my own, and it has helped me immensely. It has been emotional, to say the least, but with my tears has flowed a lot of pain and burden that I no longer have to carry. 

Arkansas flowed through me on the backs of some people in my father's family who didn't love me the way I needed. As I wrote about one person and then the next one and the one after that, I noticed a pattern. These were people who were mean to me and weren't there when I needed them, and yet I still pursued relationships with them. My unhealthy quest to belong with them extended to relationships I then sought with other people who didn't love me the way I needed throughout the decades. As I wrote, I struggled to understand why it was so important to me to have these connections. I wrote until I made my way to the heart of the matter, and it sounded like this:

I was afraid to let go of this relationship and the ones to other family members on my dad's side because I had been riding this made-up promise that I could be part of my family if I was there. It has made me the very definition of insanity. I kept showing up for my beatdown, over and over like a fucking Weeble Wobble. Because if the people on the respectable side of my family didn't love me, all I had was my Arkansas identity as hillbilly, white trash. And that I am afraid of most of all.

In the week since I wrote that paragraph, the memories of how I took on the stereotype of the hillbilly came flooding forward. In the summers when I would visit my dad, my grandmother--his mother--would complain in front of my brother and me that my mother had once again sent us to them with patched up clothes, badly in need of haircuts. My Sha had patched my favorite jeans and I had been grateful. In front of Grandma Atherton, I felt ashamed of those patches, and my mind populated other ways I was disconnected from being "normal." When I lived in Arkansas, I always felt dirty. We were poor. I never wanted for a meal or warmth, but none of the extra things that kids showed off at school like designer anything, calculator watches that played Pac-Man, or talk about camps or other trips were accessible to me. When I visited Illinois in the summers, we got to eat at McDonald's and go to amusement parks and the city swimming pool and buy toys we couldn't take with us. So in my mind, what I concluded was that without my Illinois family, I was worthless. I was lost to poverty, to a life where people get stuck and they never get out, they just die and go back into the ground there.

I thought I was handling my grieving of the child who believed that false narrative pretty well this week, until yesterday. I don't know how to explain why, but I felt as if the bottom was going to drop out. I called my beloved friend Gracie, who reminds me of sunshine, and asked her if I could come over. We sat in her back yard, and I told her about all of this, about how I felt so sad for that beautiful little girl who couldn't get what she needed from the people who were supposed to love her. I talked about what growing up was like, and about how it felt to know there were amazing people who were from the place where I grew up, how that changed things for me. I talked about the color that has come back to my memory, about the love I have now that is so much better than what I had then, how many directions it comes from, how every moment I live now stands on the moments I have lived, and how I couldn't have gotten to these beautiful days any other way. I felt my ground again after that talk, and I am so grateful to my friend for bearing witness to all of that.

Today, I feel just a little more home in myself, and a little more healed. I am learning, slowly but surely, that who I am is not a place on a map, and it is not in anyone else's love or lack of love for me. Who I am is in my sacred root, connected to the core of the earth and reaching deep into space, flowing with God and the Oneness of Everything throughout. I feel it all when I breathe deeply, fully of the life that I have been blessed with. Today, I got to travel a little further down the road to forgiveness, and that is the place where we all get free. 

Off I go, to continue to trudge the road of happy destiny.