When I was in third grade, my family moved to a small farm town in rural Pennsylvania.
I immediately noticed the different accents and how “weird” the street names were. I was used to streets named after trees (Maple Drive, Cherry Street), but my new town’s roads were often named after locals, some of whose families had been there for generations, like Bemisdurfer Road and Leitersburg Pike.
Since I had no choice in the move, I resented it with all my little third grade soul. I decided I was not happy there, and that I DID NOT LIKE THIS PLACE.
As I grew up, I noticed more and more things I didn’t like.
Our small town was mostly white, with our middle and high schools playing out common movie stereotypes of social groups: the jocks, the band geeks, the emo kids. We also had the 4-H kids, the farm kids.
There was a clear through-line of wealth and socioeconomic status to popularity. The wealthiest kids were often the most athletic, and in my class, it seemed like many of the popular kids’ parents worked in the school system. The cheerleaders were the most popular girls. Some were very good friends of mine (I was a cheerleader myself) and some of them mean, whether by choice or out of the necessity of living on such an impossible pedestal.
It’s the kind of town where you don’t have to look far to find Confederate flags.
Bullying was common. Especially if you were queer, a person of color, or poor.
But me? I was teased for having hairy arms. I had my own name, “the Minotaur,” which was brutal as a kid. As an adult, I have to admit I find the name pretty funny, although there’s something especially irksome about someone using their intelligence—their knowledge of Greek mythology—to bully you.
The point is: I knew what it felt like to have a part of my identity used against me.
And my brain lumped all of this together.
Country. Farmland. Cows. Horses. Nothing to do.
Bullying.
Racism.
This conflation, combined with my already resentful nature about being there in the first place, led me to build an identity as far away from country as possible.
This identity manifested as a distaste for country music, cowboy boots, big belt buckles, and pretty much everything western. And while I’m embarrassed to admit this, I think somewhere, consciously and not, I believed that those who identified or showed up as country weren’t as educated or evolved as me.
Looking back, I can see what that identity was doing for me. Rejecting everything country was my way of planting a flag: people deserve to be treated with kindness, and treated fairly. I felt other people’s pain so deeply that I needed to be clearly, visibly on the other side of wat I blamed for it.
And I held that identity for thirty years before the armor began to crack.
I was sitting at the pool one day when Zach Bryan’s Pink Skies came on.
I loved it…
…even though I heard the country in it. I remember coaching myself through a moment of, “it’s okay to like this even though it goes against the identity you created for yourself.”
Years later I happened upon the TV show Yellowstone, and it cracked the armor fully off. I had spent (wasted) so much of my life looking down on country and what I thought it represented. I had flattened an entire culture into a caricature.
It took a TV show to help me not only see the beauty in farm life and appreciate the connection between it and the food I eat, but also to see the story I had been telling myself for thirty years.
Country music, cowboy boots, farms, Confederate flags, racism, being forced to move, feeling like an outsider… I’d melted all of this into one thing and called it “not for me.”
For thirty years, I held an identity that didn’t really serve me.
What did I miss out on by letting this shadow rule the show? By being “anti-country”?
It’s painful for me to think that there are friendships I didn’t build, curiosity I didn’t extend, and people I decided weren’t worth knowing before I knew them.
The worst part is knowing that some people in my life have probably been hurt by it.
It’s complicated, because some of what I felt came from a good place.
As a massive empath, when I watched popular kids be cruel to anyone different, it wrecked me.
I hated the bullying.
And somewhere in there, my hatred of that cruelty curdled into something uglier: I decided I didn’t need to understand them to know I was better than them.
Empathy for some hardened into judgment of others. I looked down my nose at farm kids and cowboy boots and country music, because it was easier than separating the people who were actually cruel from an entire way of life I’d never lived.
I let the worst of what I saw stand in for all of it.
That’s not a comfortable thing to put in writing. But I’ve built a career on asking leaders to get honest about the stories that shape how they lead, and I don’t get to ask that of you if I won’t do it myself.
So here’s what I think was actually happening: the human brain is built to be efficient. To make predictions.
When we’re emotionally hurting, our brains can compress complexity into simplistic thinking to keep us safe.
It’s efficient, but it also creates massive (sometimes 30-year!) blind spots.
The work of leadership is learning what lenses we are using to see the world, our companies, and our teams. Learning how to unbundle what our brains might have conflated. And learning how to hold complexity.
Where might you be making assumptions that feel as true to you as my assumptions of country felt to me?
What do you have to gain by questioning your own story?
Leadership isn’t always about seeing other people more clearly. Most of the time, I think it’s about seeing ourselves more clearly.
It’s about noticing the stories our own brains wrote decades ago, and deciding whether or not they’re still true.