Chicago, I might be breaking up with you
This is Part 2 in the Humdrum series/journey toward homeownership. Enjoy Part 1, where I worry-debate over the pros and cons of buying a house, here. If you’re new to Humdrum and would like get it in your inbox, subscribe here.
If you asked me, in 2019, if I would ever consider moving away from Chicago, the answer would have been “hell no.” I moved to the city in 2006, found an apartment and roommate online (not Craigslist but close enough), sold my car and quickly learned to navigate the CTA as well as any local. I found a job, changed jobs, and started building a career. I made friends and fell in love here. This is my home. Or I once felt it was my home. The ability to choose where to live is a gift. I first chose Chicago.
I knew from all the small and mid-sized Midwestern towns I’d lived in growing up that I did not want to live in any of them. A trip to New York at 16 was that first slap of recognition that a city was where I was meant to be, followed by another ~5 years later, only this time I was in Chicago. My friend and I sat with our toes in the sand at Oak Street Beach, our gazes to a sparkling lake and our backs to the John Hancock Building and the Sears Tower and the whole glittering city pushed up against a blue sky that went on forever, and this time it was this magic I wanted to be part of.
Less than a year later, I was here. I was giddy, and a little smug that I escaped the boring existence of those small Midwestern town I grew up in. I felt like I was espcaping the stereotypical trappings of heteronormative suburbia that I never wanted: the husband and wife each with their own car in an attached garage, commuting into the city to work, the silent neighborhood that looked the same as the other silent neighborhoods that stretch on and on because everyone was tucked into their isolated bunkers. The ennui of the weekends, only the shopping mall and the movie theatre and Dairy Queen parking lot for fun.
No doubt some of these feelings were rooted in teenage angst. But I also wasn’t interested in the traditional trappings of adulthood: marriage, car, house, kids. The only thing I really wanted was a cool job that I cared about in an exciting place, a place with millions of different people and a music scene and museums and art and shops (so many bookstores!) and festivals and beautiful buildings vibrating with energy. Chicago represented possibilities and told me important things, fun things, interesting things were happening. I only needed to find them.
It felt right when I got here, age 22, very green and starry-eyed. I moved because I wanted to this time. I was chasing a feeling and I followed it to someplace big. Maybe I was searching for that feeling of home or to be in a place that felt more like me.
In the decade plus that I’ve lived here I did feel that Chicago was home. I’ve done so many of the things I wanted to do: I’ve meandered around the art museums, gone to concerts in small clubs and big venues with new friends. I’ve been to Cubs and Soxs games, sipped cocktails at bars all over the city, ridden my bike down Lakeshore Path and hung out at the beach. I even have a cool job now.
But. . . after years of working on Michigan Avenue, and sharing sidewalks with lollygagging tourists with their cameras and shopping bags, the giddiness of landing that first job on a world-famous street has, many jobs later, morphed into a persistent, low-level crankiness. I had once been thrilled by The El, but the time to commute is erratic, often times it’s too crowded, smelly, loud. Two-plus hours of my day is on a bus or train with me trying desperately to become absorbed in a book or some nonsense on my phone so I won’t notice how stressful this all is.
The city can wear you down after a while. Other people stop becoming people but obstacles in your way. The pandemic has only intensified these feelings. I’m glad that I live in a neighborhood where everything I need (grocery, pharmacy, coffee) is within a 15 minute walk, or a short bike ride. I avoid leaving my neighborhood if I can. But hovering on just these few streets when I know there’s more a little further away has started to make me feel trapped. Like I trapped myself because to leave my neighborhood requires time, energy, and/or expense. I must gird my loins.
Even before March 2020, I had started to turn into a homebody. Concerts became rare and only if the venue had seats. Definitely no more 4 a.m. bars. I didn’t wander around different neighborhoods or meander around shops so much anymore. Logan Square and other neighborhoods to the south and west might as well have been different states. Happy hours became rare. Meeting a group of friends required a certain mental pep talk. Part of me will always want to sit on the couch with a glass of wine and a book. Date Nights might entail the occasional show or dinner out, but a lot of the time we stayed home. The bright bustle of the city I’d loved so much I’d mostly stopped being a part of.
There’s a second part to this story: it’s that of a deeply self-absorbed kid growing up. Or maybe it’s growing out. I wrote in my book about this vision I had for myself when I was in my 20s, about being some fabulous world traveler who would bounce from place to place wearing fabulous scarves and doing something equally fabulous before leaving. Living out of a suitcase, being tied to nothing, seemed so sexy and free.
10+ years later and I am embarrassed by this fantasy. Bouncing around from place to place has started to feel selfish. To be clear, I don’t mean travel or going on a trip. I’m talking more about a mindset, a way of approaching the world that means not knowing, or caring to learn, much for the people or communities or environment around you. It’s a way of staying separate, aloof. I do not think this is a good way to live.
The person I was when I moved here, that person who wrote that book, is not the same person I am now. I often think about a question Anne Helen Petersen posed in her Culture Study newsletter, “How has the pandemic radicalized you?”
And this is one of the reasons it has radicalized me, put into sharp focus that which was blurry before: this idea of community and connection and family. The part that wants to put down roots somewhere and grow out instead of in. As much as I love Chicago, as much as it’s been my home, I don’t feel that it is my home. I’m trying to articulate that sense of being a part of something, perhaps it is belonging, and what I experience here is its absence.
Still, I love this city, and the friends I made here. I get that glitter-feeling when I catch glimpses of the skyline. There’s this stretch on Clark Street in Rogers Park, nine miles from downtown where you can clearly see the Sears Tower, massive and solid, and I’m momentarily wowed and I feel a tug again of how lucky I am to live in a place with such a building, that I can even see it from my own neighborhood.
That doesn’t change these deeper, squishier, harder-to-define feelings. But I also feel certainty, like I did that day at Oak Street beach, toes wiggling in sand. It’s time to start over, try somewhere different. Maybe this new town will fit, maybe not, maybe in five years I’ll want to come back to Chicago. I don’t know, that’s the scary part. But I know I’ve been radicalized out of the big city. My teenage self would freak.
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