Twenty Years Here. Twenty Years More?

In 2019, I’ve gotten a little trendy.  With New Year’s Eve being my favorite holiday since childhood, I always get into resolutions.  But this year, I stepped it up and chose a word of the year (delight), made a “19 for 2019” list of things I want to accomplish, and wrote my own happiness project.  The happiness project is pretty involved, has categories, and stands alone as a relative guide for how I wish to approach life. The categories are things like Physical Self, Life Outlook, Communication, Productivity, and Fun-and-Play-and-Feel-Good-Stuff.  I’ve referred to it often in the past seven months and have found it to be very grounding. 

Item number 9 under “Fun and Play and Feel Good Stuff” is:  make peace with NoVa or make a plan to really take steps elsewhere.  

Twenty years ago, on August 5th, I drove a rickety U-Haul truck one-way from Harrisonburg, VA to Fairfax, VA.  I still remember frantically cleaning and throwing things out of the college apartment minutes before leaving, as well as negotiating that my college roommate Beau could have the plastic patio table that I had forgotten was technically ‘mine’.  I also remember pulling away and looking at sad-faced Beau, waving in the rectangular side mirror. I made it to the I-81 junction before sobbing. 

I had procrastinated moving to almost the last possible minute, as I wasn’t particularly excited about it.  I was starting my student-teaching placement at Annandale High School and though school wasn’t to start for a few more weeks, I was sorta obligated to begin my experience with the marching band camps a few weeks prior.  I had been through a lot of farewells that summer having stayed in Harrisonburg, clinging to as much of JMU as I could, and finishing out a fourth summer of babysitting the kids of a local family whom I adored. I still have the sweet card that the older one made me for my last day, with detailed pictures of all the things he enjoyed doing with me - highlights being go-karts and getting free Cokes at Grand Piano Furniture.  My boyfriend and I were about to embark on the not-so-exciting long-distance relationship while he stayed back in Staunton, VA with a job he liked. Many friends and other roommates had left. It was my turn, but I wasn’t thrilled.

I arrived in Fairfax with maybe one or two days to settle in before having to report to camp.  I was technically still a college student, so I was living off a combination of my student loans’ room-and-board money and a credit card to pay rent and bills.  I honestly didn’t know if or how I was gonna afford to student-teach in the area. But everyone at JMU seemed to collectively think that student-teaching in Fairfax County would lead to stronger chances of being hired in Fairfax County, and the world collectively seemed to think that this was what I was supposed to want to do.  There would be a larger pool of jobs for music teachers because there are tons more schools, and student-teaching in them would be your ticket in. The alternative was to student-teach locally to JMU, which would have meant more rural schools and lots of driving - possibly to schools an hour away from Harrisonburg. I considered it, but having grown up in a smaller town I knew that my odds of landing a job in and around that area would be slim due to low supply.  

Truthfully, I spent zero time really considering where I wanted to actually live; it seemed I was supposed to get the best job possible and worry about its location later.  42-year old me is flabbergasted by this thought. I’m confident I wasn’t alone in my experience just out of college, but goodness I wish I’d known that then. I felt very, very alone and confused, and that I had no time to feel alone and confused because…

There was traffic!  Leaving just two minutes later than planned can mean being an hour late.  There’s so many people! Every place and every thing seems to have already been discovered and you’re grossly late at trying to approach a slice of it.  Everyone is in a hurry, all the time. Everyone has their own agenda and no time to consider inviting you to it. It’s expensive. Good grief. I was lucky that my first rent was relatively cheap, though it only seemed that way retrospectively once I later jumped to more expensive places.  I felt for a long time that I just didn’t have the password to the area. There are days I still feel this, but I’ve learned to sorta laugh at it and see it for what it is.  

I won’t bore you with all my woes, for this story evolves to a happy place and the woes don’t really matter, except to serve as stepping stones.  Some really low points of those first two years included :

• being blindsided dumped by the long-distance boyfriend
• my dad being diagnosed with mouth cancer and eventually passing away nine months later. 
• generally having no real friends in the area
• having a strained roommate situation that made me want to run away but I had nowhere to go or no means to do so
• having to get rid of my beloved cat because of roommate allergies (and again, not having other options like moving out on my own and feeling controlled by that fact)
• watching my beloved college friends settle down elsewhere and miss them terribly while hearing about how happy they seemed doing all kinds of things that seemed completely out-of-reach to me because, wrong password.

Don’t worry, some good things happened too!  For example, I got a job in Fairfax County. Check!  In the middle of the school year, too! Looking back, that timing was an important detail.  I interviewed for the job while I was technically still student-teaching, and they offered it (even though I was an hour late to the interview because...leaving two minutes later than planned!) on the contingency that I actually did graduate in December.  (I did). Had I not gotten that job, I probably would’ve spent some time in NoVa from January to August actually job-hunting, exploring the area, and possibly thinking about whether I wanted to put down any roots or try somewhere else.  Then again, I don’t think I was capable of such thinking then; I think that had I taken a hard look at any of it, I would’ve felt even more terrified and paralyzed. I was in my own fog and just lucky to have some small claim to the area - a job.  

It is a true story that during my first two years in the area, I:

• called in sick during my second week on the job because the kids were so badly behaved and rude to me during my first day there that I was scared to go back.  I mean, a kid threw a chair at me, others cursed because I took too long to pronounce their names taking attendance, #teachernightmares in the flesh.  (Luckily, two weeks later, I didn’t have to return. A full-time job in one school - the one I liked the most of the three - opened up and I stopped traveling to multiple schools each week as an itinerant.  Talk about LUCK.) 
• Dated a super attractive bartender from Honduras who asked me out after a karaoke night at his bar.  He smoked, drank heavily, and did all kinds of things that would usually go on my Do Not Date list but #hot and more importantly - I was super lonely, it allowed me small breaks from the roommate situation, and it was fun.  It ended exactly when it should have. His name was Manny. (I still find that to be a fun name!)
• Decided around 8pm on a particularly bad Friday night that I would drive to NYC and spend the weekend with my friend Cyrus who was at Manhattan School of Music at the time.  I didn’t really know how to do this, except that I would get on 95-North and look for signs for a train station as I got closer. I used a paper road atlas to figure this all out and having no cell phones back then, called Cyrus from a pay phone at Princeton Junction where I was about to get on the literal midnight train and “could you meet me wherever the train is gonna let me off?”.  Every time I get off a train in Penn Station and see the escalators that go up to the terminal, I laugh and celebrate the fact that I’m still even alive, mostly because Cyrus guessed the correct way to face as mobs of people came off mobs of trains at 1am.  But all was well and I blew off much needed NoVa stress, dragging my huge green Nike duffel bag (my only luggage then) into several bars until 4am. 
  
  
  

  
• I got a new car (a Saturn) after my very old Honda Civic completely died on the DC beltway.  While visiting my hometown, a good friend saw it for the first time and commented that it looked like a “very NoVa car”.  This completely threw me, and I spent more time than I wanna disclose trying to figure out what that said about me. It could’ve (and likely was, considering the friend) meant something positive.  But I took it as a horrifying mistaken identity crisis, even though I was foggy about why it was so.  

My husband grew up in Northern Virginia.  He is a product of the school system and general vibe of things here.  When discussing the pros and cons of the DC metro area, he likes to refer to the fable of the frog in boiling water.  He is the frog who started in tepid water, slowly heating up, never thinking to jump out. I am the frog who was thrown into the boiling pot of water, frantically kicking and jumping out in a panic.  Except I haven’t jumped out. I’ve just thought about it a few million times.  

Here’s what I’ve (sorta) gathered about the area that makes my frog legs twitch:

It’s a very unforgiving place.  Not in the correct lane to make an upcoming turn at a major intersection?  Forget it. Sin of all sins. You with your naive turn signal, hoping someone will just give you a break.  20% chance. During rush hour? 5%. I was recently publicly called out on an online neighborhood forum for misunderstanding a woman’s arm out her car window signaling for me to go around her (I thought) while she stopped illegally (residential road, one lane) to let someone out of a pool parking lot.  The pool car and I had to both brake suddenly, but it was nothing even close to a near-collision. The kinda moment where you’re a little miffed but, unlike the internet warrior, you move on. I happened to log onto the neighborhood forum a few days later to post a few items to sell online, and found myself reading about my horrible, “Trump-like”, entitled behavior, the words “tar-and-feathered”, and threats of showing a picture of my license plate, which the poster presumably had taken.  It took every ounce of grace and composure to not wield my writing sword (which was gonna be epic) and instead nervously endure a dozen more comments before a moderator with a cooler head prevailed and shut the thread down due to it being slander and going against the forum’s policy. There’s not an abundance of benefit of the doubt, patience, or empathy - unless you hunt for it.  

It can produce and almost celebrate anxiety.  I’ve enlisted a new phrase to use as a reminder when I start to overthink something:  “Don’t NoVa it.” Most of the time I catch myself afterwards saying, “I just NoVa’d that, didn’t I?”.  A great example is preparing for an outing while on vacation somewhere else. I will assume, no matter the size of the town/city/village we are in that if we don’t make a reservation at a restaurant, we will have to wait at least two hours for a table or that there will be some unavoidable hassle in participating in whatever we’re trying to do.  I will scour the internet for clues to this being the case, framing the hypothetical outing as “not easy”, and take on the mindset that I’d rather be pleasantly surprised if it turns out easy, which it often does. Then, I’ll feel silly and a little confused, like “why was I so stressed about going to play mini-golf?” But in NoVa, I’ve been burned by multiple scenarios where my time ends up being wasted with waiting for tables, traffic, things being offered at certain times on certain days and aren’t you dumb that you didn’t just know that or think to look it up in advance?  The maximizer part of my personality really really hates wasting time or not getting the best out of a possible experience. My friends Roxanne and Caitlin likely remember when we had to wait over two hours for a table at a local restaurant and were sorta led astray by the hosting staff who told us it’d only be an hour. Logical me knew that in the grand scheme of things, this was not the worst thing that could happen to a person. But the me that was paying for babysitting by the hour and had wanted to also visit a dessert place after dinner was having a temper tantrum inside my head, seething at the idea that so many other people had dared go to the same restaurant where I, an apparent princess, wanted to spend my evening with friends.  Nights like that make me want to “NoVa” everything when it comes to planning. I’m learning that it’s not always necessary and if you are someone in NoVa who is not running around like a chicken with their head cut off and also enjoying a leisurely, trendy brunch - I admire you.  

You might be my NoVa hero.

It can also seem like there’s a competition to be the busiest, most important, most stressed, and I completely fell for this hook-line-sinker my first few years.  Actually, more than the first few years - let’s say several years. I have to overly remind myself that most things about my job or home life are not actual emergencies or even urgent, for that matter.  Sure, there are times that are better to go grocery shopping than other times. That’s probably true everywhere. Sure, if you don’t call the pediatrician to book a wellness appointment two months in advance of needing it, you don’t get in.  That might be true everywhere too. You can get appointments as early as 7am in the area, which seemingly prioritizes everyone’s workday, but that doesn’t mean you have to book your appointments then. Things that are optional are just that - optional. But I’ve often interpreted such options as “this is trying to tell me that I *should* run myself ragged and make all life tasks equally important because I have been offered the opportunity to do so.”  For me, it’s been a learning curve.

It is a transient area.  Friends (good ones that last) are hard to come by.  I call this the DC Area Eggshell.  It’s not that people aren’t friendly, because many are.  But there’s friendly and then there’s inviting. Two different things.  I’ve learned that I have to do the inviting if I hope to have ebbs and flow in my social life.  If you had told me ten years ago that I’d be the one hosting monthly music teacher happy hours, annual staff parties, Gilmore Girls watch parties, Super Bowl parties, Christmas Craft Weekend, occasional dinner parties, Daylight Savings Day parties, and cookouts - I’d have told you that did not sound like me.  This part of my personality of actually loving to host and bring people together has formed out of a necessity and general complaint about the area. Friendship lemonade. The transient nature of the area makes it challenging to crack people’s shell open beyond a smile and holding the door for you, which also seems difficult for some people but that’s another topic.  The trick is repetition, and you’re not likely to see the same people repeatedly beyond the workplace, or even if you do - some people simply don’t have the time to invest in other people if they’re only in the area for an internship, a limited education experience, military, or a job stint.  It’s not their fault, it just is. I had to work so hard at meeting people and forming relationships that I started testing extrovert on personality tests for the first time ever. In my late-thirties, it finally started to swing back - a sign of a deliberate acceptance of it all.  

It’s a difficult place to shine.  Now, I am not saying that I need to shine.  But I think everyone, deep down, wants to feel like every once in a while, they did something unique, something meaningful, something they feel is authentically positive for their life.  Coming from a small town, I was provided opportunities to shine that at the time, I didn’t realize would not be as easy to come by later. I was the only girl in the drum line for a while.  Shiny. Drum captain/section leader in college. Also shiny. I got good grades and was offered the International Baccalaureate route (which I sorta regrettably didn’t take). Could’ve been shiny.  I was sorta a big fish in a small pond in teeny ways. Transplant me to NoVa at age 22. Guess who else got good grades? Everyone in the area. I trained for a marathon. A mar-a-thon. It took months and months to train and I have done this four times total, dedicating entire seasons of my life to it.  You know who else runs marathons? Every third person you meet, and most of them are doing it faster, more often, and are less injured afterward. There are approximately 300 people who do the exact same job that I do, which I used to think was sorta a niche (and definitely would be in a smaller town where there’d be one music teacher per four schools).  It can be easy to feel like a number, not very special, like your hopes and dreams are commonplace, and unnoticed. This requires emotional and spiritual work, which I know, I know... is part of being an adult.  

The soul and culture of the area can seem cloudy.  You know when you travel to NYC, Chicago, New Orleans, Miami, or other major US cities - you catch a general feel of what makes that place what it is?  There’s certain foods, experiences that stand out. (#keepaustinweird) I can’t really figure out DC. I mentioned the transient nature and I think that’s some of it.  I guess it’s the political capital of the free world, so that’s unique, but that very thing also makes the area very...political. The museums are great. The monuments are noteworthy and it’s a great city for tourism with thriving schools and fine arts programs - all contributing to a culture.  I think what gives me pause is that I can’t pinpoint the soul of the people. Like, what makes DC people tick? What are we valuing more so than in other cities? I’m watching “West Wing” for the first time and it shows sweeping shots of DC and it makes me feel patriotic to spend 42 minutes in a fictional White House’s world.  But in real life, DC people seem...stressed, not overly patriotic, nose to the grindstone, close to the chest, a little jaded, serious, always striving for better while not considering present successes. I’m not sure the area knows how great it’s doing, or what it IS great at doing, or celebrates much of it before moving on to the next Big Accomplishment.  I wanna stand on the mall sometimes and shout to people around me, “hey...do you see how nice this all is?” So much funding, so many opportunities, so many cultures mixing, so many perspectives to consider...let’s acknowledge that everyone’s hard work is helping to create that! #partyforthepeople 

Actually, DC recently did what I think is the first really cool thing I’ve seen it do in my 20 years here.  The celebration of the Apollo 11 anniversary in July, put on collaboratively with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and other institutions, was in fact a celebration that not only honored the colossal accomplishment by hundreds of thousands at NASA, but was presented in a way that I thought really translated a heart of DC I don’t often feel.  Having attended a branch of the celebrations at the Kennedy Center, I was moved to think, “Yes. Thank you, DC.” If you haven’t watched the 11-minute video that was projected onto the Washington Monument, it is worth the time.  

You probably think, “good grief, what a whiner.  Move to a small coastal or lake-town somewhere and drive the mail truck that doubles as the egg delivery truck” (#futuregoals, #notkidding). Obviously something has made me stay for 20 years, beyond a steady paycheck.  Having just had the amazingly lucky opportunity to take a year off from work and spend it with a toddler, I’ve had some brain space to devote to that line item #9 of making peace with the area. I’ve realized a few things that have saved me from jumping out of the boiling pot.  Some of them are simple perspective-flips; looking at something that I used to see negatively and realizing that there are positives to gain from them. 

The opportunities are endless and generally easy to access.  Wanna see native plants from India?  There’s an entire wing of a (large) museum dedicated to that, and it’s free.  Want your toddler to take an early-childhood music class? There’s six kinds to choose from within a five mile radius of your zip code.  Wanna go to a zoo? Eat (amazing) Nepalese food? Ride a historical and possibly themed train? Walk in the woods and wade in a stream and see a beaver?  Take an art class? Talk about stargazing with other enthusiasts weekly? Attend a concert that will most likely be above average? There’s hundreds of choices, for every lifestyle, with many folks working very hard to make them available and at a high quality.  I have taken my child to dozens of programs and have been amazed at the high quality of teachers, organizations, content, as well as the general access to it all. Seeing the area through the parent lens has really flipped it for me - I think it feels like the password I thought I didn’t have before now.  Maybe I didn’t go out of my way to have certain life experiences in the area for myself, having seen them as hassles or uninviting, but you better believe I will do so for my child. And so far, it’s a pretty awesome place for a kid.

The resources are endless and generally easy to access.  Home improvement, retail, medical needs, education...you have so many options.  Shop local, or don’t. You can do both. Want holistic medicine? Multiple centers for just that.  Want a very specific cabinet pull for your kitchen cabinet? You can find it at one of probably thirty stores, and today.  Need to know the best time to show up at a festival with a toddler? Three websites will give you real-time advice at your fingertips because they know they’re not the only ones having wondered just that, that day alone.  I know the internet provides a resource for anyone in every place if they can and choose to use it, but there are positives about having quick access to real resources because of the larger market here.  

It’s a great place to travel away from, to go to other places.  This is a huge positive and has been a big saving grace for me.  Hundreds of day trips. Culpeper, one of my favorite lovely small towns...one hour drive.  Annapolis? Similar effort. Weekend trips galore. Planes, trains, car services all readily available with multiple major airports, train stations, car-sharing options.  We take full advantage of this as a family and it really does help shake things up when you’re feeling a little bogged down in the grind. A short weekend away does wonders for my mental health. 

Twenty years to the day and here we are...traveling away.

I’ve slowly but surely found some great people.  People who are eclectic.  People who are from here and people who are not.  I get different perspectives from that alone. People who have helped me through the not-so-fun times and people who help me celebrate the good.  My ex-boyfriend, an extremely hard worker, had the patience to basically teach me how to turn a low-paying job into the opportunity to purchase a condo pretty early in my journey here - which turned out to be a very valuable asset and will help pay for my kid’s college.  Other friends have led by example in exploring the good in the area and letting me tag along. My husband has saved me most of all. I met him during a year that I was back-of-my-mind planning on treating as a NoVa trial, tempting fate that maybe it was the year to get out.  His happily boiling frog legs are calming the waters for mine.

I’ve gotten braver about taking more bites of the area for myself.  The Northern Virginia Writing Project, for example.  A mind-blowing save. In 2009 I applied, daring to think that a hypothetical hobby could be honed and celebrated a bit.  Incredible experience. It gave me a little more identity. Sometimes I even dare call myself a writer because of it. Other bites I’ve taken...leadership roles in the county, a masters degree, orchestras and community ensembles, a private lessons travel-studio and side hustle company, running workshops and many races, an online Buddhist course, barre classes that are changing me more than I anticipated, volunteering with Make-A-Wish, advocacy groups for gun control efforts, and maybe most shocking - I know most of the employees at the local grocery store, which I used to despise going to.  (That’s more my son’s doing.). If you don’t put yourself into the community, you get no community.  

So, peace is growing.  I will focus on the abundant good.  I still make jokes about people’s general gloom on airplanes that are flying to the DC area and in DC area airports (seriously, does anyone smile anymore?) and I will still check google maps to make sure I’m not putting myself in an unnecessary hassle-zone for wherever I’m planning to go.  But for now, until the water boils up again, I will be the smiler, the person who invites others over (especially if they are new to the area and are maybe lonely like I was), the person more understanding of the option to say no even though an option is presented, the person who can appreciate a great moment when I’m riding a little train for $3 that takes my thrilled toddler up and around a pretty lake and landscaped gardens - all adjacent to a sizable local water park and carousel with family passes.  And I’ll exhale a little deeper and more quickly into a trip away, with gratitude. 

Or, I’ll see ya on the mail truck.