I’ve been having an interesting self analysis going on as I watch myself, trained as a journalist, try to liberate myself more in my creative writing endeavors while also trying to build some new structure, intention and vision around my work. Writing can be really frustrating sometimes. Musicians and actors and dancers get to exert themselves in the performance, the physicality, the sweat. The act of production and performance is inherently at odds with the writer, forever too much to say for words and fingers to really capture — a movie forever stuck in my mind. (Especially when you also write for a living xD )
The thing I notice most relates to the process of determining “newsworthiness” that is ingrained in me. Constantly running any idea or creative direction past the invisible jury of editors in my head. And every time, I notice this process turning into a form of questioning my own sense of time, place and storytelling (ie., the story should start here because that’s the time period that’s most notable, relatable, connectable to a central thesis to then elaborate on. Clean form.)
In an effort to compromise these parts of my brain I’m just going to start writing down memories when they come to me. Instead of interrogating the idea, as I have been trained to do, I’m treating it as an experiment. If it’s coming to mind, it’s important enough to write about — and I’m curious to see how my memory writes the story for me when I let go of the leash.
When I do that, it becomes clear to me where this story started. And that is October 2005.
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I had just turned seven years old when I stepped onto Michigan Avenue for the first time. A day prior, I watched the Reading Rainbow episode about urban, suburban and rural environments in my kindergarten class. I was moving with the distinct memory of Levar Burton hailing a taxi cab, a complete marvel to me.
I love the title of this episode: “Adventures of a Taxi Dog” – originally aired in 1996
My parents had to literally intervene and stop me from waving down taxis. These guys would literally just pull over and pick you up because you waved them over. It was an intoxicating amount of agency to have as a seven year old as I stood with my head leaning back, moving in light circles as I took in a dizzying 360 view of the skyscrapers lining the streets that seemed endless.They were the biggest things I had ever seen, I remember thinking, except maybe the ocean. Or the plane. Which is an opinion I still hold to this day. I remember the feeling of that famous Lake Michigan wind, much sharper than the ocean breezes coming off the Carolina shoreline in October. It was all so much bigger and more impressive and exhilarating than anything I had ever stepped foot into, the rush of traffic blowing right through my ribs.
That feeling has never left me. My concept of place completely was turned upside down, so taken with the magic act of stepping onto an airplane in one place and stepping off in another that could be so wildly, beautifully different from everything I had ever known.
We were in Chicago because my mom was running the Chicago marathon alongside her business partner at the time, a very wealthy attorney from Charleston. He hired my mom as a personal trainer through some very serendipitous series of events and networking, and was more or less paying my mom to help him get into shape and finish the race.
There’s something sort of prophetic and woo woo about that too, I think. Like, of course my mom’s client couldn’t just be a normal rich guy, he wants to run a marathon in a far away city and bring along his personal trainer’s entire family to root for them.
I remember getting picked up early from school to go to the airport. In my mind I’m almost princess-waving at my classmates on my way out, aware of the fact that I was about to go on a huge adventure but with literally 0 notion of what it would feel like when the wheels lifted off the tarmac or what it would look like for a river to splice a city in half. It’s that high of seeing something for truly the first time, an increasingly rare feeling to encounter as experiences become more packaged and curated and conveniently delivered to us.
When we’re kids so much of that feeling is also lost to the oblivion of memory, like walls painted over with fresh sights and smells. But that first day in Chicago hit me right between the eyes — I was just old enough to really hold onto a memory consciously, and Chicago was viscerally different enough from my own world that I think it genuinely altered my brain chemistry. It was like someone went in my little mind and flipped all the lights on at once.
We stayed at the House of Blues hotel, directly across from what I would later learn was the famous Marina City (the Wilco Towers). I remember our floor being directly across from what appeared to be a bike storage room just above the car garage level and I could not for the life of me fathom how they got the cars and the bikes up there.
I remember asking my Nonna about it, to which she replied she genuinely didn’t know — she had never lived in a building like that. This in and of itself was a revelation, because Nonna was (is) the smartest person I knew.
It was defying everything I previously knew about what a place could look like. I was raised in a city where buildings can not legally be built taller than or in obstruction of the tallest church steeple, which is partially a historical preservation thing and partially a preventing buildings from sinking into the harbor thing. A parking garage taller than 3 levels was genuinely not something I had considered before.
It just so happens that Chicago, like Charleston, is built on a marsh. It’s one of many throughlines between the place I was raised and the first home I made on my own as an adult. The path to Chicago has led me through many such marches — an environment that is defined as much by its distinctness as its ambiguity. A place where man has superimposed himself on top of soft, sinking land and found a way to make a city run there, with or without nature’s cooperation.
I remember that trip in what feels like an exaggerated amount of detail. I remember eating pancakes in a restaurant with floor to ceiling windows that allowed me to stare intently out the window for the entire meal. Not daydreaming, but focusing. Trying to figure out where people were going on the street below. We ate deep dish pizza and I knocked over every glass on the table when I tried to crawl beneath it to escape and play with a claw machine in the corner of the restaurant. We took pictures on the stairs of the Field Museum, a grin stretched across my face and my eyes impossibly wide as I gazed out on the expanse of Grant Park. And that was before we saw the dinosaur skeleton.
I remember life feeling boring when I came home. I remember being back in my kindergarten class feeling perplexed by the solidity of the big rug underneath me — a stark contrast to the way the floor lifts as an airplane takes off. Things moving slowly. Zeb, one of my friends, asked where I had been, repeating the word “Chicago” back to me like it was brand new, slowly as he felt the sound of it in his mouth. Consciously or subconsciously, the shadow of that first trip followed me throughout high school and the decisions I would make after that.
This journey has given me a perspective into and outside so many things throughout the last decade – no doubt one of the most transformative in the recent history of the world, no? Moving from a small Southern city exploding with growth from big tech companies and industrial giants like Boeing and Boesch — only to find myself in the nation’s former industrial center. I traded the Holy City for the Hog Butcher of the World at a time in this country when everything seems to be a pig pen disguised as a church.
It has always sort of felt like Chicago found me, not the other way around. When people ask why I moved here 9 years ago, I typically will just offer “school” or “journalism” as an answer, maybe my full spiel about wanting to go to Northwestern and ending up at DePaul if I have time. A few have probably heard the extra long version — where I manage to include the part where Chicago was the first city I ever traveled to and that it always seemed I had connections here.
“Connections” refers to many things: my childhood babysitters, who were sisters from Beverly, living in Charleston for college. The nasally “ah” sounds in the Chicago accent and saying “pop” instead of “soda” have always comforted me because they remind me of them; My brief comedy era in highschool that sparked many a deep dive into SNL stars, many of whom earned their chops in Chicago; And, of course, as some of you know, a long-term relationship that in some ways felt more like a commitment to this city and figuring out my purpose here than anything else. But I digress.
Chicago has just always called to me. When I talk about how this place became home to me I often think about a line from the book “Severance” by Ling Ma. I believe the protagonist says this to her ex-boyfriend when he tells her he’s leaving post-apocalyptic New York for Chicago:
“The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.”
So, yeah. That’s what it is to me. And it’s now, 9 years in, occurring to me how generous this city has been with me. How wholeheartedly she welcomed by and held me and guided me when I had no fucking clue what to do next. There have been times where it felt like this city was all I really had. There are times where I have been frustrated with Chicago in ways that feel like a relationship with family, snapping at them without meaning it and threatening to move away. And I know from experience that if I do ever move away, Chicago will always be right here to welcome me back. Again, like family. The moxy and beauty and thrill and complexity I’ve built my life around here isn’t something I think I will ever really have my fill of… I just want more.
That feeling I had that day back in October 2005 has always been in the background at a low hum. It’s what brought me back to Chicago at 18 and what has motivated me to treat the city as a home base — snapping at every opportunity to live or work or frolic somewhere else. But consistently, wherever I go, I find myself proselytizing about Chicago, hollering about my love for this place in dive bars in Italy and gay clubs in London and campsites in the Colombian desert. I stopped asking why this city pulled me into its orbit long ago — I just try to focus on accepting the knowledge and fortune she’s willing to share with me.
