In the last presidential election, over forty percent of South Carolinians voted differently than the majority. More than a million people.

You would never know it from the map. A state that splits 60/40 gets colored one solid shade of red, and that color becomes the whole story we tell about this place, including the story we tell ourselves about our own neighbors.

So we go quiet. And the next person looks around, doesn’t hear us, and concludes they’re outnumbered too.

The Indigo South is for anyone in this state who has ever sat in a break room or a pew or a pickup line and said nothing, and driven home feeling like the only one.

You’re not the only one.

Some weeks this will be numbers, because numbers helped me. Some weeks it will be a story. Some weeks it will be somebody else’s letter about what it’s like where they live.

What it will never be is mean. The people I disagree with in South Carolina are not strangers to me. They raised me. They taught my Sunday school. They helped me move. I have no interest in a South Carolina where they lose and I win.

I just don’t think anybody should have to feel like the only one in the room.

Written by a Navy veteran and father of two in the Midlands. Anonymously, for now.

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