I try and tell myself that where I come from is a strength. That it doesn’t bear negative weight on who I am and where I am. But some days I just can’t shake the feeling that I don’t belong – that I am a creature of another environment – and that everyone knows it too.

The following quotes, from a NYTimes article on class, resonated with me:

…”I think class is everything, I really do,” she said recently. “When you’re poor and from a low socioeconomic group, you don’t have a lot of choices in life. To me, being from an upper class is all about confidence. It’s knowing you have choices, knowing you set the standards, knowing you have connections.”

…”The shock of going to live in wealth, with Joe and Virginia, it was like Little Orphan Annie going to live with the Rockefellers,” Ms. Justice said. “It was not easy. I was shy and socially inept. For the first time, I could have had the right clothes, but I didn’t have any idea what the right clothes were. I didn’t know much about the world, and I was always afraid of making a wrong move. When we had a school trip for chorus, we went to a restaurant. I ordered a club sandwich, but when it came with those toothpicks on either end, I didn’t know how to eat it, so I just sat there, staring at it and starving, and said I didn’t feel well.”

… “I couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world,” she said. “And while I knew East Kentucky, they all knew a whole lot about Massachusetts and the Northeast. They all knew who was important, whose father was a federal judge. They never doubted that they had the right thing to say. They never worried about anything.”

Most of all, they all had connections that fed into a huge web of people with power. “Somehow, they all just knew each other,” she said.

…”The norm is, people that are born with money have money, and people who weren’t don’t,” she said recently. “I know that. I know that just to climb the three inches I have, which I’ve not gone very far, took all of my effort. I have worked hard since I was a kid and I’ve done nothing but work to try and pull myself out.”

The class a person is born into, she said, is the starting point on the continuum. “If your goal is to become, on a national scale, a very important person, you can’t start way back on the continuum, because you have too much to make up in one lifetime. You have to make up the distance you can in your lifetime so that your kids can then make up the distance in their lifetime.”

…And though in terms of her work Ms. Justice is now one of Pikeville’s leading citizens, she is still troubled by the old doubts and insecurities. “My stomach’s always in knots getting ready to go to a party, wondering if I’m wearing the right thing, if I’ll know what to do,” she said. “I’m always thinking: How does everybody else know that? How do they know how to act? Why do they all seem so at ease?”

Class Matters – Social Class in the United States of America – The New York Times