Growing Up Inside Sameness

I grew up in a tiny little, mostly agricultural community in west central Ohio, one of those places that looks almost identical now as it did when I left 43 years ago.  Mostly homes stayed in the family, and in rare cases when one came up for sale it usually went to someone who had grown up in the area anyway.  My Sister actually purchased my Granny’s house and renovated it, and then passed it along to someone else.  I lived in that purple house in Millerstown for nearly all of the four years of high school.  It was one of those towns that if you’ve never been there, you really haven’t missed much.

I went to a small rural school district established in 1957, the Graham school district.  Back in my youth I went to Graham South elementary.  Prior to becoming part of Graham Schools, it was Christiansburg-Jackson School and was originally built around 1907, finally closing in 2007.   Later it was torn down, along with Graham North and East.  The school carried the name of A.B. Graham, yes the founder of the 4-H youth agricultural program in 1902 that later grew into  the modern 4-H global program focused on hands on learning, leadership and agriculture.  

There was a sameness in the looks of all those elementary schoolhouses, and even the fields around those schools looked the same.   The small towns in the district shared that same sameness, Rosewood, Terre Haute, Carysville, Millerstown, Westville, and Thackery.  All familiar places filled with the same small town hard working men and women whose collars were mostly blue.   What I didn’t notice then was a deeper sameness, the near total absence of diversity of any kind.

In my entire childhood and young adulthood there, I cannot recall going to school with a single person of color.  Maybe there was one kid, but they were not in my circle.  My world was built out of sameness, and sameness became normal, and sameness became my truth.  Looking back, I can see it more clearly, the quiet but ever present “you ain’t from around here are ya?” energy that is so common in small towns, at least in my experience.

I can recognize now that the sameness built a certain level of blindness in me.  What I recognize today as casual xenophobia that just in the air we breathed.  When a kid from California moved to our high school, we were brutal.  He wore an earring, a boy with an earring, in his right ear no less and we were 100% convinced that meant he was gay.  That tiny detail was enough for us to mark him as “other.”   Anything outside the script of sameness felt disruptive, and disruptive felt dangerous and scary.  I know now it was a moment in time that is long gone, but it still sticks with me.   

I also remember going to a diner with my Sister when I was back one time and the server asked where I was from, commenting on my accent.  I said Millerstown, to which she replied without hesitation, “no you’re not.”  I had to run through my graduating class and the folks I went to school with before she’d believed me.  I have seen a version of that play out in nearly every place I have been.  In smaller communities where everyone knows everyone else, the xenophobia is not intentional at all, it’s inherited.  We humans are literally wired to protect ourselves from the unknown, and in places with limited exposure, the unknown can be nearly everything.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to unlearn the idea that sameness equals safety.  In a homogenous place, everything reinforces itself, beliefs, expectations, the rhythms of life, nothing interrupts the script.  I was not raised to reject difference, I was simply not taught to recognize it, appreciate it or engage with it.   Stepping out into a world where people looked different, loved differently, worshipped differently, or simply lived with different perspectives and opinions left me more confused than hostile.  It created a confusion about the great big world and how it worked, in all the ways I never even contemplated.   The world was expanding faster than my ability to keep up with it or my understanding of it, and in many ways, that is still true to this day. 

I also find a certain irony in all of this.  Folks from rural areas pride themselves on being grounded, self-sufficient, practical and grounded, and they truly are in ways city folks cannot ever fully understand or appreciate.  The sameness that supports those attributes also creates a fragility.   It prepares folks for continuity, which is essential.  At the same time it does not prepare folks for the complexities that exist in the world.  I learned a lot from a lot of amazing people, people who loved me, but they simply couldn’t teach me things they never had to face themselves.    

There were so many answers I needed and I did not even know what questions to ask.  My world was so small I didn’t even realize what I wasn’t seeing, and that’s the part that humbles me now.  I think back to that kid from California, all the shit we gave him because of an earring.  The irony is, I ended up getting one decades later and I put it in my right ear because of him, and I don’t even remember his name.  It makes me laugh now, and it also makes me think about how each of us carry little moments like that, unresolved crap from our childhood when we weren’t leading with our best selves.

And now when I look back at that tiny Ohio town with its sameness and the long gone purple house, the familiar fields, it’s not my prison and it’s not my promised land.  It’s siply where I started this crazy journey called life.  I see the beginning of a story, one that took years to understand and one I am still learning how to interpret with courage, honesty, and humility.  I will be forever grateful for having had the childhood I had, it was stable, predictable and full of people who took care of each other.  And I’ll always hold myself accountable, for examining the blind spots that came with it, so they never define the path ahead.  I am imperfect and flawed so I have no expectation of perfecting myself altogether, and I am ok with that.   

Pretty amazing place Millerstown