Identity Is Playing A Shell Game With Yourself
“Of course, you’re really country.”
I blinked. How did anything about me convey “country” to my friend? I grew up in a metropolis nearly as populous as the entire state I live in now. Up here, drive an hour in any direction and you’re in a rural area. Back home, drive an hour and you haven’t yet left the city.
But I knew what my friend was getting at. The West Coast context makes my East Texas twang sound stronger than it is. For the locals here, the difference between “y’all” and “all y’all” is esoteric stuff, some real oathbound material. Dense and sprawling though my hometown is, “Southern” signifies “country” to Northern ears.
That’s how I answered my friend at the time. But what if I’d leaned into it, instead? I could have played up the folksiness and the quaintness, made a whole persona out of being a bona fide Texan. But — despite adjusting to a few genuine cultural differences after moving — making my Texan-ness a central feature of my personality would have been profoundly fake. I would have been performing a character, shaping my mannerisms to match regional stereotypes that don’t necessarily have anything to do with how people in Texas live.
More to the point, I only had that option because Texas is so far away. Back home, it would’ve been bizarre to go around “acting Texan” —…