Richmond
I don’t know how to write about Richmond.
I keep meaning to. I know it’s been ages since I’ve blogged, and I have all of these words rattling around in my brain, like beans in a child’s makeshift tambourine, jangling inelegantly and imprecisely.
But you see, I don’t know how to capture ten months of last year. It seems like yesterday and also ages ago. Sometimes it seems idyllic; sometimes infuriating. (I suspect, as in many things, the truth is somewhere in the middle.)
For a long time, I was angry. Living in community was hard, one of the hardest things I’ve done, and leaving last June 30 was jarring. It was like walking into the sunlight after you’ve been in the shade for a while: you didn’t realize how nice it was in the sun, how warming and how comforting it could have been if you’d just laid somewhere else. I’d forgotten what it was like to make more than $200 a month, to go into a kitchen and have there be food I like every single time, to go to sleep without earplugs, to not have to worry if chicken had been left out overnight in someone’s drunken stupor, to find a gym shower disgusting and not an unimaginable luxury.
And that made me angry. I thought a lot about some of the messed up things I’d been a part of or witnessed during my year of service, and I was angry that I’d been put in those situations. I blamed the year for my mental health deterioration and became unable to cope with stress. The anger was blinding, and I didn’t have much positive to say that wasn’t my abiding love for my worksite.
Then I realized I was lonely. I moved back home and realized all of my friends had moved away or moved on. There are not five other people around me all the time, always ready to watch Netflix or vent to or go to the gym with. And while I’m not a person who needs people all the time, I am a person. People need people - even imperfect ones (because really, aren’t we all imperfect people?).
I often get frustrated, too, that I don’t tend to dwell on the good things. I don’t speak often enough to my family about the love that the parishioners showed us -- I think of one church member in particular, who always went out of her way to gently love on me, encourage me, gave me books and advice in her sweet voice but never pushed or asked too much. Why doesn’t my family know Ally by name?
Why doesn’t my best friend know Judy, the chaplain at the school who became the rector at the church when our priest went on sabbatical? Judy, who looked out for me, who encouraged me to advocate for myself, who was kind unfailingly and sensible always and who once, memorably, took me out to a nice lunch on one of only truly bad days I had at work.
I don’t think about making an epic Spotify playlist with all of my roommates, about margarita night at Little Mexico, about running the Monument Avenue 10K with Melissa, about how driving in downtown and Shockoe Bottom always felt like a new city.
I forget the time Paris pulled me aside during a retreat and had a heart-to-heart with me about my career plans; I forget going to get coffee during a check-in and spilling scary things that I’d not told anyone else.
I rarely remember listening exclusively to Stephanie’s holiday CD for the month of December, especially when we drove all over Richmond looking at tacky and classy lights alike.
And honestly, I barely think about Richmond itself. What a beautiful city, and what an amazing opportunity I had to live it in - an opportunity I tried to make the most of. But as I write this blog post, memories of walking to Carytown in freezing January and sunbathing on Belle Isle in the most perfect February day God has ever created flood my mind. When I drove to Target, I drove down Monument Avenue, through those odd roundabouts that I never quite mastered and past historic homes that perhaps once housed Confederate generals. I learned TollTags and that it’s worth it to drive on the RMA from Carytown at night as opposed to driving through Randolph. I kayaked the James River and hung out in Hollywood Cemetery and walked my little neighborhood and drank in Virginia.
But when I think about last year, I think more about the blessed relief of spending half of my spring break in Farmville with one of my high school best friends, sponging off her Hulu account and drinking chai on the couch at Uptown than I ever do about Richmond.
There’s a lot that surrounds last year. There are so many layers to it that I often think of Donkey’s line about onions in Shrek. It’s been my narrative that last year was hard. And it was - it was so hard, and not all of it was the good hard that you learn lessons and grow character from. Some of it just plain sucked.
I want to put myself back in the narrative, though, and think about how hard I worked to build memories. There were rough times, and I wouldn’t do it again. But that doesn’t mean it was bad, and it certainly doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend the program to someone. There were good, good times last year - exhilarating, hilarious, delirious, delightful, joyful times, and I want to remember those. I want to look back on this year and see my bravery and happiness, and I won’t be able to accomplish that without more unpacking.