I let everyone at work think I grew up somewhere I didn't, and I've been doing it for eleven years.

I'm from a town in eastern Kentucky of about twelve hundred people. My father worked at a mine until 2004 and then didn't work. We were on assistance for a stretch in the nineties.

I went to a state school on a scholarship and then I got a job in Chicago, and in my first week somebody asked where I was from and I said "outside Louisville," which is technically true the way Cuba is technically outside Florida.

I've been saying a version of that for eleven years. I've let people assume. I've laughed at a joke about a trailer park in a conference room. I have a flat, placeless accent now that cost me actual effort to build.

Nobody at my company is cruel. That's not the story. The story is that I decided at twenty-three that where I came from was a liability, and I've been managing that liability ever since, and the management has become who I am at work.

Two things made me write this. My daughter is seven and she's never been to the town I'm from. Not once. I always have a reason.

And my mother called in August and said my old high school is closing — consolidating into the county school — and asked if I wanted anything from the building, and I said no, and then I sat in my car in a parking garage for twenty minutes.

I don't think I'm ashamed of them. I think I'm afraid that if people see where I started, they'll adjust what they think I'm worth.

Anyone come back from this? Not the speech version. The ordinary Monday version.