I Didn't Know I Was A Hillbilly

Appalachia and Academia

Even though I’ve lived in Appalachia for my entire life, I was about 39 years old before I knew the word Appalachian applied to my identity.  I didn’t live in Kentucky or West Virginia. I didn’t live in a trailer or on a dirt road. I didn’t live near anything that resembled a farm or a barn, in fact I wasn’t even allowed to have anything with fur as a pet. My parents ran a strict goldfish only household and I’m not much for Mountain Dew or walking around barefoot. Every once in a while, something about our county would get mentioned in the news or depicted on a t.v. show and everyone around me would comment about how bad those things made us look. They never looked like anything I had ever seen or encountered, so I never really thought much about it; however, there was this ever-present energy that said my hometown was a place to leave and runaway from or else you would risk a lifetime of being bored and undervalued. No one ever really said why or called it out directly, you just felt it.

When I was 39, I was working full time as a therapist in my hometown of Cumberland, MD. I went back to school to get my PhD because the one-on-one work I was doing as a counselor didn’t seem to be enough to address the patterns I was seeing. The opioid epidemic had hit my hometown pretty hard and it was tearing people apart from the inside out and the outside in. I wanted to learn more about research and contributing to the counseling field and I wanted to have more of a community level impact, so I returned to my alma mater to learn how to take what I loved about counseling to the next level. I was so proud of my master’s degree and that educational  experience changed my life. I missed the drives to Pittsburgh for class and the passionate discourse of higher learning. After graduation, I had seen calls for research papers and conference proposals, but I felt woefully inadequate and unqualified to submit any of my ideas. I was excited to learn how that part of the education world worked.

It was during the first year of my doc program that I learned something profound, something I didn’t see coming, something I didn’t know I needed to know. I learned I was a hillbilly.

It happened indirectly, almost by accident. In class, I started talking about my work as a therapist in the high need low resource setting, of the unique mental health and treatment challenges when working within rural poverty. Professors told me I seemed to be finding my niche and that personal experience was often the driving force that inspired research. My first conference proposal was accepted, and I was shocked when 200 people attended. It was encouraging, but I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of being a poster child for rural poverty in academia. More of my ideas were accepted and met with enthusiasm. It was odd to me how many of them were selected under the category of diversity. Classism is often overlooked, but I felt like maybe I was doing something wrong, like I was taking advantage of something. Did these people know I didn’t bathe in a river or put soda in my baby’s bottles?

AND THAT’S WHEN IT HIT ME

My imposter syndrome about Appalachia was rooted in the stereotypes that come from other people, from people who don’t live here. Just because my life didn’t look like those images didn’t make it so I wasn’t from here or that there aren’t very real challenges unique to the culture of Appalachia that impact mental health. Being a mental health professional, I was aware of  negative stereotype threat, but being a cisgender White woman in a heteronormative relationship, I focused more on my unconscious bias towards others so I wouldn’t cause pain. I never thought about how I might hold bias against myself or how others might view me if they knew I was “mountain folk”.  Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee. I had been accounting for hillbilly bias for most of my life.

When I was a kid, my mother was very strict about language and tone. It was mostly annoying and weird and it often disrupted the flow of my storytelling. The word “ain’t” was never used because it was deemed “not a real word” and we were never to say things like “yous”. If any television shows depicted poor manners or decorum, they were forbidden. I was raised Catholic, but religion didn’t seem to have a role when it came to these rules. They did seem to relate to a fear of how we would be perceived by other people. She relaxed a bit over the years and accepted us calling her “mom”. Her mother had fussed about “mom” and “ma” sounding like you were calling a barnyard animal.

We live in Maryland, but we are literally across the bridge from West Virginia. I heard so many West Virginia jokes throughout middle and high school, usually about people being inbred or illiterate. It made me glad to not live over there. People complained about the politicians down state forgetting about us up in the mountains once the elections were over. I experienced numerous microaggressions related to hillbilly stereotypes. I was working in a call center that had headquarters down in the city. The workers there were excused from working if they had bad weather but we were “hearty mountain people that could handle it.” In the process of being appointed by the governor to serve a local board,  the interviewer found out I lived in Allegany County and said “oh you guys sure have a lot of drugs and covid up there.”

These things can seem small, but they matter when you add all the puzzle pieces together that make up one’s identity. I internalized so much out of this unconscious fear of being seen as less then, as an unreliable moonshine swilling hillbilly who can’t be trusted to be responsible. I was unknowingly working double time all the time. I was hesitant to ask questions throughout graduate school because I didn’t want people to catch on that I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had figured that was because I was a teenage mom who wasn’t supposed to get to graduate school. Hillbillies aren’t supposed to either.

Hidden identities and internalized stereotypes can have a huge impact on self worth and mental health.  It's oddly stressful to occupy multiple worlds at a time and to never really fit in in any of them. I never left Appalachia, but my education level alone is enough for many people to feel that I’m not “from here” anymore. I’m also a first generation college student, so academia doesn’t feel like home either. When I hear stories and theories about multiculturalism and the importance of cultural humility, cultural competence and intersectionality, I know not to make other struggles about me. I don’t have to worry about a cop looking at me and making a snap judgement. I can also see how we have so much more in common than we realize, but we aren’t taught how to see the commonalities or how to hold space for the differences.

One of the hillbilly stereotypes is that we are hard working folks who aren’t afraid to rebel against the man. When I was in graduate school and learned about internal bias, empathy and multiculturalism, I wondered why the hell I had to get all the way to grad school to learn this stuff.  Now one of my reasons for living is to try to teach this stuff in a way that helps more people than earning a psych degree or individual therapy ever could. I think we all have a lot of unconscious stereotypes holding us back and keeping us from connecting with others and I think that’s what the powers that be want. I didn’t know I was a hillbilly, but I sure know now so lets get to it. We are long overdue for a mental health rebellion.

Rebel Well My Friends.

-Rayelle