I think my first big trip as a child was when my family went to New York City. I don’t remember much, honestly, other than going to see The Lion King on Broadway and learning what a city block was. I distinctly remember my father joking that I was destined to be a city dweller because “block” became part of common parlance for me after that (as young children are wont to do with newly discovered words and concepts).
Since moving to DC, one of the most frequent questions I get is, “What do you like about the city?” I have a deli-prepared spiel about the walkability, the museums, and the international melting pot, mixed with the hellish nature of living in the nation’s political capital. But the true answer is, of course, far more complex and nuanced.
A few months ago, I was facing what felt like the life-altering decision of where to live. My parents wanted me to move back in with them, which I had to reluctantly consider (in some respects, it felt like they were weaponising my tenuous financial status, but that’s a tale for another day). I thought about moving back to Michigan, despite having spent nearly a decade prior trying my best to leave the blasted mitten state. I’ve always been someone who’s had the basic, if erroneous, attitude that there is some objectively “best” path in the decision tree that makes up life. Of course, I know that this is absurd, but it’s nevertheless been a paralysing fear when I’ve had to make big life decisions.
I was strangely adamant about continuing to live here in DC. Call it obstinance, inertia, naivete, etc., but as painful as many of the drastic changes in my life have been these past few months, I did not want to give up on the tenuous roots I’d begun putting down. I might’ve lost my taproot, but fragile secondary roots still felt better than starting all over again with none. There are plenty of well-reasoned psychological reasons for my insistence on remaining in DC, even against what felt like all odds at the time. Sometimes people reach a breaking point in their life where they do need to completely start over, including in locale, but other times people need some filament of continuity to hang onto for dear life while the rest has been swept away. I found myself in the latter category and, while unemployed with zero prospects, I told myself I’d try to “make a go of it” in the city for a year and then see what happened.
So: what do I like about living here so much that it made me want to stay?
- My little goofy Episcopal church filled with a wide range of people, including many lovely and older gays and queers who’ve welcomed me. This is the first church I’ve ever formally joined, and my favourite part of the service is when the cantor sings the Psalms. It is also the first church I can walk to, just one neighbourhood away.
- My neighbourhood, with its coffee shops and restaurants and farmer’s markets and the same adorable dogs I keep seeing over and over again. It’s a popular place on the weekends, but I know the rhythms of how the everyday city lives here, and I can text my friend Sophia to tell her “the crowd on the metro is different today,” or “do you also feel like people are being extra crazy this weekend,” and my assessments are accurate.
- My new best friend Sophia, with whom I commute on the public bus most weekdays and talk to everyday and go to funerals of people I don’t know to help her stay sane while she’s trying to run an extremely disorganised gathering. At least once a week after the work day, we meet up at our regular neighbourhood bar, embodying that “woman working in the city but swinging by her local haunt before walking home” wistfulness that people imagine of city-dwellers.
- My new job in a federal agency that I somehow lucked into, and everyone has been nice so far, and the work-life balance seems good, and we all go out to lunch on Fridays to celebrate the weekend. They finally listened to me and we went to my favourite Italian deli near the office last week, and now they won’t stop raving about the place. Maybe some of them might even want to be my friend outside of work someday.
- My odd ability to make odd friends with my bizarre and new confidence in how I move about in the world of DC. I recently made two new friends via Reddit-then-Discord-then-real-life and then we found another friend during bingo at the local sapphic bar, and now we’ve all gone together to the Maryland Renaissance Faire and send each other Instagram reels. I’m also chummy with one of the other young people in my church—she lives a couple blocks away, and we walk to and from church together most Sundays and catch up on life and chat inanely about small silly things.
In some ways, I know that DC isn’t anything special—I could be living the expensive, highly taxed young adult life in numerous different cities around the world, and this is just where I happened to land. But this is my city now, and I am doing my best to embrace it. I might not be in DC in a year’s time from now, but these are just some of the reasons I wanted to stay. Some of these connections might dissipate if I move away, but others will remain. I love the idea of being someone who can still text a friend to grab coffee or a beer when I’m back in town a decade from now.
