“It’s like DC except you get two senators.”
I was 26 the first time I remember consciously having to explain where I was from.
“Basically,” I trying to think of a geographically closer similarity. “It’s kind of like saying you’re from Dallas, but technically you’re from Irving.” I was 100 miles away, at a dive known for its fried catfish somewhere between Tyler and Athens, Texas. “The closer you get to Dallas the more specific you have to get, right? My hometown is kind of… defined by its proximity to the seat of the federal government.”
6 years ago I was thrilled to move to rural east Texas, tired of my hometown. The lines between Montgomery County, Washington, DC, and Prince George’s County didn’t really become clear until my early 20’s — I could always spell the words “jurisdiction” and “gentrification” but didn’t really pay attention to what they meant.
Because even though every time a relative visited we took them downtown on a tour, my brothers and cousins and I giggling as we contorted our bodies on the steps of the Capitol trying to play the part of Bill in “Just A Bill on Capitol Hill” from Schoolhouse Rock, I was an adult before I realized other people found DC exciting.
Because at least one if not multiple school field trips a year found us asking if we could ditch our brown bags and just get hot dogs from one of the vendors around the National Mall.
But I didn’t understand then that while I was learning about “American history,” what I was learning was hardly past tense.
Every relative that visited got a tour, every concert I went to before my senior year of college was downtown, and 75% of the first dates I’ve been on in my life have been with men who moved here to work for the government and thought I would find that VERY impressive. (And no, leaving it at “I work for the federal government” doesn’t make me think you work for the CIA; I’ve dated Langley and you aren’t Langley. Just tell me you work for a Tea Party Republican and you know a local girl wouldn’t have gone to dinner with you if she knew that.)
But just because I could call myself “local” and government shutdowns didn’t mean I was furloughed, that not even my parents had moved here for a job with the federal government, didn’t mean I really understood yet what “gentrification” meant.
My parents had taken us to the White House for the Christmas trees and my strongest memory of it was marveling that my mom had found a ribbon to put in my hair that matched the skirt of my dress exactly. We’d been to the Washington Monument for the 4th of July fireworks and my strongest memory was my dad yelling at people to watch out, they were about to crush his 5-year-old daughter on the Metro afterward. I had never really felt the need to go to either again.
But just because I flashed back to that memory every time tourists or summer Hill interns held up sidewalks and escalators didn’t mean I understood yet just how much I, too, was resented as an invasive species — by kids whose classrooms, and whose lives, had been used as photo ops and props by members of Congress or Department of Education nominees who then never thought about them again when they talked about “dangerous cities” with “crumbling public schools.”
We rode to Prom with the Capitol building framed by the rear window of our limo; we graduated high school at Constitution Hall.
But I didn’t yet understand how different my graduation and my Prom looked from kids who along with their parents and grandparents had been born and raised with “Washington, DC” in their address — especially if Address Line 1 included “SE” at the end of it.
I was a University of Maryland student but any time I was assigned something that required leaving campus it was inevitably in DC — I groaned about having to spend a Saturday off from school going to the National Gallery for class; I linked arms after leaving a play and smiled at new friends, who called New Jersey or Florida home, as they gushed about how insane it was that the White House popped up along our walk to a Metro stop that would allow us to skirt the scheduled single-tracking, how they had just seen it for the first time in their lives and hadn’t been “ready.”
But just because I was already tired of the self-important airs of people who worked at the White House didn’t mean I understood how to explain to my new friends why “The West Wing” was far from reality.
I’ve had internships and jobs and graduate school classes that had me debating the morality of stealing Metro fare; I related to legends of the characters found on the NYC subway — sitting next to a man loudly claiming to be a prophet and a prince AND “Barack Obama’s first cousin” on the ride into work was just Wednesday.
But somehow, explanation of the difference between the power Maryland’s governor had over public transportation funding versus what the DC mayor could do had gotten left out of the textbook for my 10th grade “National, State, and Local Government” class.
When I began running long distances, I quickly booked plane tickets to run half-marathons in other states because I was tired of running from the Monument to the Kennedy Center or the Capitol to the Smithsonian Castle yet again. Training for my marathon I’d do my long runs with my feet starting in Maryland and by the time I made my turn around for the out-and-back I was in Georgetown.
I had no idea how much I’d miss the freedom of being able to run all over DC on foot until it had been invaded by a pandemic and occupied by 26,000 National Guardsmen.
I avoided TV political dramas until a roommate urged me to watch “Scandal” and “House of Cards” and then I had a lot of concerns about how apparently easy it was to overhear conversations involving national security if I just decided to go to the Lincoln Memorial at night, and I was very critical of how the Metro stop that played Union Station was definitely not the Union Station metro stop.
But I had no idea yet how scarily not out of the realm of reality “House of Cards” would become.
When eventually I found myself in Tyler, Texas and someone asked me “who my representative was,” I told them Louis Gohmert, having no idea who represented me in Austin. My whole life Annapolis had just been a place we had gone once a year to visit my Nana Augie and my aunt Jessie. But I was about to learn just how important it was that even though I thought of “the capital” as DC, I’d always been able to vote for or against two Senators.
I sat waiting to hear whether my mom had cancer for the second time on a bench in Foggy Bottom, staring up at GWU Hospital, hearing freshmen ask their own moms on their phones if she was making stuffing as they waited for their Ubers to take them to the airport for Thanksgiving break.
I had no idea yet just how much an effect my mom’s decision to move east at 23 would have on who I would, or had already, become as a person.
But by the time I found myself on plane beginning to descend toward DC on my first visit home from Texas, and noticed the sting of tears in my eyes when I first spotted the Jefferson Memorial and its reflection in the Tidal Basin at night from my window seat, I had finally begun to understand.
And because of that, when I got to Texas, the first time someone asked me if I was a native Texan or a transplant, and I said “oh, no, a transplant — I’m a native — well, I was born in northern Virginia, but grew up in Maryland — “
And seeing the confusion on their face, I figured I could own it. I’d explain some other time. I knew the bifurcated identity of having grown up in western Montgomery County, the wealthy white suburbs of DC; I had experienced the added weight of learning about the generational effects of systemic racism in a university classroom in College Park, Maryland. I knew that more than anywhere else Maryland or Virginia, my identity was defined as much by Washington, DC as it had been by “Falls Church, VA” on my birth certificate or “Rockville, MD” as my home address. And in a place where the city limits were noticeable by sight alone, I had begun to understand why the suburbs make a person feel like they’re from nowhere and everywhere.
So I said, “I’m from DC. I grew up in the suburbs, just outside of DC.”