For my first new post under the redesigned Mid-Atlantic Bias, I talked about my day. Today, I’m going larger. In fact, I’m going Mid-Atlantic on ya’ll.
Kids (and for the sake of this argument, “kids” will be defined as young people without a college degree, who aspire to possess one and not be unwed teenage parents/townies) spend a good deal of time thinking about where they’re going to move to first after college. Or at least that’s my understanding because that’s how I was in my late teens.
For a long period of time it was Florida. Nearly all of my family vacations were spent there. And I mean, who could argue with sunny weather, gorgeous people, hundreds of miles of beaches, and a state shaped like male genitalia? If you’re reading this, you likely know that I tried, unsuccessfully, to go to college in Florida. Family circumstances put the kibosh on that. And that’s fine.
For my high school graduation, my aunt flew me out to her home in Berkeley, CA and I fell in love with the Bay Area. Not as sunny as Florida, certainly. And different kinds of beaches in the Bay Area. But the food was great. And the people were cultured. And it was far away. That’s all very cool when you’re 18.
My aunt moved a few years later and that afforded me the opportunity to see a new home, this time in Boise, Idaho. I remember my friends laughing that I was going to spend a week in Idaho. I mean, what’s there besides white people and potatoes? Well, I found out, mountains, a lot of sun, and a whole bunch of transplanted former Bay Area inhabitants. My head spun trying to decide where I’d move to right after college. It was so exciting. Except…
All of these thoughts of grandeur are wonderful until they have to be put into action. There’s a difference between being a day-dreaming 20 year old with no cares and being 3 days away from graduating college without a career all lined up, waiting for you on stage as your University President hands you an empty diploma holder. And when faced with this latter situation, I freaked out, completely incapable of thinking about the future (or the present).
Six months later, I was in my bedroom in Massachusetts packing up my suitcases, frankly no more sure of my future than I had been six months prior. But the only thing that kept me remotely sane during that six months was leaving and there was nothing else that could even remotely compensate for that loss. So I was moving. I didn’t know for how long. I didn’t know what I’d be doing (blogging for my own sanity it turned out). But I was moving. And not to Florida, or San Francisco, or Boise, or New York, or Chicago, or…
No, I was moving to Washington D.C.
Some background (as if there wasn’t enough already): My parents weren’t/aren’t really the “historical types.” My family vacations didn’t take me to Mount Rushmore, or any National Parks, or Philadelphia, or Washington. We went to the beach. I had spent roughly 15 minutes of my life in Washington D.C. prior to moving here and that was right after graduating from college, sitting in the backseat of a car, driving down Constitution Ave. looking at all of the things that I had missed out on in my first 22 years in America.
Never in my childhood, in my boringest of boring dreams did I ever think I would live in Washington D.C. In fact, I’m not sure that I realized that anyone actually lived here besides the President. The only thing I knew of about the non-political side of D.C. was the copious amounts of violent crime. You know, the gangs and the guns and the drugs, all of which filled up the areas that weren’t covered with sort of marble structure dedicated to Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln or whomever.
But there I was, cliche as it is, my car all packed up, driving away from home, wondering, “What the hell am I doing?”
While I’m still not quite sure what I’m doing, I must say that looking back, I’m not sure if there could have been a better move for me at the time. I was at wit’s end. I had no job. I had no tangible direction. I woke up, filled 12 hours of my day, went to bed, and repeated that schedule the following day. The six months after college, before the move, was mostly hell. A series of anxiety attacks offset by brief respites. Moving to a place where I had just one tie and zero expectations, but wasn’t terribly far from home, worked for whatever reason. It comforted me. It relaxed me. And I found myself happy to be here, even if it had never been part of my grand dreams.
Mid-Atlantic Bias 
