When Georgia Rep. Mike Collins posted a Photoshopped image of JD Vance the morning after the vice presidential debate, it felt like the latest attempt to project onto Vance what we want to see, rather than looking at who he really is.

I can relate.

The first time I heard of JD Vance was in graduate school when “Hillbilly Elegy” was selected for University of Wisconsin-Madison’s university-wide reading program. This was 2017. I knew nothing about the memoir, and I certainly wasn’t expecting to see myself reflected in Vance’s story. But I did.

Vance grew up in the Rust Belt in Middletown, Ohio; I grew up in the Rust Belt in Jeannette . Vance worked as a grocery store cashier; in high school, I worked as a grocery store cashier at the Giant Eagle on Route 30 in Irwin. Vance was deeply and personally affected by the opioid epidemic, and I, too, saw the impact that opioids had on Westmoreland County in my classmates and while working at the now-shuttered Rite Aid on Route 30 in Greensburg.

But perhaps what I found most relatable about Vance’s story was his experience as a first-generation college student. I was seven years into my higher education, and I had never even heard of the term “first-gen.” I was the first in my immediate family to go to college, but I learned the power of a strong introduction and a firm handshake from my dad, how to write a crisp and concise resume and cover letter from my mom, and I was doing just fine.

However, I was struck by how his memoir articulated my own inner dialogue — what I didn’t know going into pharmacy school but was slowly learning as I entered my PhD program in 2017.

“… successful people are playing an entirely different game,” Vance wrote on page 214. “They don’t flood the job market with resumes, hoping that some employer will grace them with an interview. They network.”

And Vance was right. I pursued my PhD because a professor in pharmacy school said I had potential. I got my graduate research position because I (politely) stalked my future adviser off an elevator at a professional conference. My adviser connected me with my now boss and department head the day after I received an email from a colleague about the job posting.

I also resonated with Vance as he described returning home to Ohio from his graduate training, especially his “inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility” and not wanting to feel like a traitor to his community of working-class Americans.

He echoed sentiments I sometimes feel when visiting family in Pennsylvania — I was the one who chose to leave, and I am now an alien in my highly conservative hometown in Westmoreland County. My liberal beliefs can be isolating and are often laughed away and attributed to my higher education.

Now, years later, when I listen to Vance speak, I feel a sense of betrayal and frustration.

Odd, maybe, to feel betrayed by someone I never met. But also oddly familiar when you spend your life feeling like a bit of an outlier in every space — being “too educated” and “too liberal” in your hometown yet “too uneducated” and “too unconnected” in your day-to-day life.

While I can accept and respect the differences in beliefs of policies that will help middle-class Americans the most, I cannot justify or condone the lies, the exploitation of migrant and LGBTQIA+ communities, and the harm the Trump/Vance campaign is causing.

Vance’s words are building walls that are further shutting communities, like my hometown, off from the rest of the world. His divisive rhetoric is causing children to feel unwelcome and unwanted and providing even more incentive for them to leave and never return. Eventually, I fear, no one will be left, and the Rust Belt will earn its title of “rusting out” and cease to exist. And that breaks my heart.

Was I wrong to find anything relatable in Vance’s memoir? Should I remove “Hillbilly Elegy” from my bookshelf altogether?

I don’t think so. I think at least some of our projecting onto Vance is born of his chameleon-like qualities, easily shedding his “Hillbilly” persona when convenient or donning it like a shining coat of armor when he’s vowing to save the day for middle- and working-class America.

He remains on my shelf as a reminder — of the love I have for Western Pennsylvania, of my commitment to helping other first-gen students build their social capital, of the pride for my upbringing and the community that raised me and of my mission to stay true to who I am, regardless of what others project onto me.

Taylor Watterson is an assistant professor in the college of pharmacy at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.

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