I spent most of my life trying to escape my Southern background.
Not in some dramatic, conscious way – but in a thousand small edits. I learned how to flatten my voice. I learned which words to avoid. My parents told me they raised me not to have a country accent, and when extended family from out West or up North came to visit, they would comment on it openly: Wow, Aden and Lindy don’t even sound Southern. I didn’t understand what that really meant at the time, but I understood that it was something to be praised. Something to maintain.
So I did.
I reinforced it everywhere I went. I talked openly about how much I hated growing up rural, white Tennessee. I distanced myself from anything that could mark me as working class. I learned early that “Southern” was often shorthand for uneducated, backward, unsophisticated… and I wanted no part of that association. I didn’t want to be misread. I didn’t want to be underestimated. I didn’t want to be trapped inside other people’s assumptions.
What I didn’t realize then was that I wasn’t just shedding stereotypes. I was sanding down parts of myself.
Recently, I spent a long time talking with my step-grandpa about his upbringing all over Nashville, including in The Nations – back when it was a deeply working-class neighborhood. Not in a way that demanded explanation or pity. Just in the way people talk when their life is understood as normal. He talked about growing up surrounded by people, about discipline, about getting into trouble, about laughter and routine and survival. About saying what needed to be said because there was no benefit to pretending otherwise.
My step-grandpa has always seemed rough around the edges if you don’t know him. He’ll tell you directly to stop pulling the dog’s tail or knock it off – but he always laughs right after. Always smiling. Always joking. He carries joy with him in a way that feels effortless. Discipline was never about fear. It was about care, about keeping people in line because they mattered.
This is the same step-grandpa and grandma who took my dad in when my parents divorced. It wasn’t framed as generosity. It wasn’t a conversation. It just was. Helping family wasn’t something they performed; it was something they did. My dad wasn’t the first child they supported, and he wasn’t the last.
Growing up, their house was never quiet. It was full in the most literal sense: kids running through hallways, cousins everywhere, men gathered around the TV yelling at race cars, food on the stove, cans opening, doors occasionally slamming too loud. And just as quickly, someone reminding us to shut it gently. There was structure. There were expectations. There was affection without restraint.
They disciplined us more than probably anyone else in my family – but it was never harsh. And no matter what, I always wanted to go back. You always knew what you were walking into: correction when needed, followed immediately by hugs, laughter, and reassurance. Love was not conditional on performance.
Mornings were calmer. My grandma had a way of holding steady even with seven grandkids in the house. Peek-a-boo eggs. French toast. Everyone fed. Everyone counted. Everyone safe. There was nothing chaotic about it. It was practiced, intentional, and deeply competent.
I think I knew, even then, that we didn’t have much in a financial sense. I could see the contrast when we visited my mom’s parents’ house – bigger, quieter, fewer people moving through it. Not less love. Just a different structure. But in my nána and step-grandpa’s home, abundance wasn’t measured by space or silence. It was measured by presence.
Somewhere along the way, I learned to feel embarrassed by that closeness.
I didn’t want to take the path of the members of my family that didn’t finish college, that had kids young, that lived plainly and spoke directly. I told myself I was growing, evolving, becoming my best self. In reality, I was buying into a version of success that required distance – distance from class, from community, from the people who made me.
When I dropped out of school many years ago, I felt like I had disappointed everyone. That shame hit hard. But my step-grandpa and grandma made it clear (without dramatics, without lectures) that they weren’t disappointed in me. Not for a moment. They accepted me exactly where I was. And they were proud of me.
And instead of letting that acceptance ground me, I pulled away. From all of my family. I thought proximity to them might hold me back. I thought I needed separation to succeed. Now I understand how backwards that thinking was.
I needed family to survive college culture. I needed them to enjoy life. I needed the deep knowing that my worth was not contingent on credentials, timelines, or respectability. I needed to understand that who I am is not something I escaped. It’s something I carried forward.
The irony is that the qualities I once tried hardest to erase – directness, emotional honesty, valuing people over appearances, understanding discipline as care – are the very things that allow me to move through the world with clarity now.
This isn’t about rejecting any part of my family. Every branch matters. Every version of love shaped me. But this is about recognizing how deeply I internalized class shame, and how much of myself I muted in the process.
I don’t want to escape my Southern background anymore. I want to hold it with intention. Not as nostalgia. Not as caricature. But as lived truth.
If my younger self – the one carefully shaping their voice, trying so hard to be taken seriously – were sitting at that breakfast table, I’d want them to understand this: there is nothing lesser about a life built around care, consistency, and showing up. Having less money does not mean having less meaning. The love in front of you is not something you need to outgrow. It is something you will return to.
The most authentic version of me wasn’t something I needed to invent. It was already there – waiting for me to stop running.
What They Gave Me
It took me a long time to understand that what I was absorbing in that house wasn’t just love – it was a way of seeing the world.
Discipline that wasn’t about humiliation, but about responsibility. Care that wasn’t conditional on achievement, but a constant sense of who was missing, who needed to be fed, who needed to be taken in. These weren’t abstract values. They were practiced daily. And long before I had language for class or power or labor, I learned that people are shaped less by what they own and more by how they treat one another under pressure.
When you grow up in spaces like that, you learn to read dynamics instinctively. You notice who carries the burden and who gets credit. You notice how work is distributed, how care is shared, how rules are enforced – and who they’re enforced on. You learn that survival is collective, even when society insists it’s individual.
I think that’s why class analysis never felt academic to me. It felt familiar.
The values that now shape how I understand class struggle – solidarity, mutual obligation, suspicion of respectability, refusal to confuse worth with credentials – weren’t learned in a classroom. They were learned at a crowded kitchen table. They were learned watching adults show up for each other without fanfare. They were learned through a kind of working-class clarity that doesn’t pretend systems are fair just because they’re orderly.
I spent years trying to distance myself from that clarity, thinking it made me less serious, less polished, less legible in spaces that prize detachment. Now I understand that it’s precisely what allows me to see through narratives that blame individuals for structural harm. I recognize the lie because I’ve lived the alternative: a world where people are valued because they belong, not because they perform.
This isn’t about idealizing hardship or pretending struggle is virtuous. It’s about recognizing that when care is treated as non-negotiable, it produces a different political imagination. One that understands class struggle not as an abstraction, but as a lived reality – felt in who has to stretch, who has to wait, and who is expected to absorb the cost quietly.
The people who raised me taught me, without ever naming it, that no one survives alone. That lesson stayed with me long after I tried to bury everything else.
I lived in The Nations a couple years ago, in one of the few old houses still standing, just down the road from where my step-grandpa grew up. We paid in a single year of rent what he once paid to buy a house there outright – decades later, in the same neighborhood. That contrast isn’t theoretical to me. It’s embodied. The Nations was once a culturally diverse, working-class community where people lived close to one another out of necessity and care.
Now it’s been stripped, whitewashed, and repackaged into something unrecognizable – homes torn down and rebuilt for people who will never know who lived there before them, prices inflated beyond what the community that sustained the neighborhood could ever afford. Living there felt like standing inside the erasure of my own history. Watching a place that shaped my family be turned into a commodity clarified something for me: gentrification isn’t just about housing markets or development trends. It’s about which lives are considered disposable once their labor, culture, and presence are no longer profitable.
The same values that once held that neighborhood together are now treated as obstacles to “progress,” and I know how to recognize that lie because I come from people who built lives without needing permission from capital to matter. The home I came from taught me what no development ever could: that a place is only as valuable as the people who are allowed to remain in it.
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