When a Place You’ve Loved Disappoints You
And what leaving it all behind means.
I’ve been a bit of a broken record, bouncing between the question of To Instagram or Not To Instagram. But recently, the answer finally arrived. I got back on Instagram. I’ve spent a week on the platform sharing some updates, scrolling, and feeling all kinds of feels about it.
It was so nice to reconnect with some long-lost friends and get lots of dopamine hits with likes and comments. To me, being validated on the Internet feels good, the sign of our times. On the flip side, it was a confusing experience. The people in my feed are people I’m being “suggested” and I couldn’t so easily discern if I actually followed them or not. So much stuff was being sold to me, one million and seven pop-ups for “turn your highlight into a reel” or “enable push notifications” kept me from navigating with ease. And my chest felt really tight. I know I’m not completely fluent in the daily intricacies of Instagram these days, and if I did spend more regular time there perhaps I wouldn’t have such a frazzled experience. But damn it was a lot for me to be taking in on a daily basis. I’m generally happy to have spent a week there, and I am very happy not to open it again for a very long time.
It’s juicy and exciting to receive such love and sweetness, to have people miss me and want to see what I’ve been up to. The positive feedback about my writing was equal parts affirming and terrifying. At the end of this week, I feel like a scribble spot of emotions. To have a visual archive of sorts that chronicles the curated moments I chose to share at one point in time and have since forgotten about, does hold some sort of significance. Getting to look back on who I was seven, or eight years ago brings up awe, a bit of cringe, grief, and tenderness all at once. And I’ll tell you one thing, I’ll be very glad that this video of Winston Charlie walking down the street to a Chappell Roan track will be a highlighted part of my visual archive for me to resurface one day.
As a lot of my personal essay writing process goes, there’s a small something (a photo, a song, a headline, a memory, a snippet of a conversation, etc.) that sets my creative brain in motion and I’m left frantically dictating to Siri to get it all out before it’s gone. Since a decent amount of my scrolling on the app this week was looking back on old posts, it was this particular post from 2016 that brought up my freight train of reflection and words…
I first arrived in Nashville in the summer of 2009. Having been pursuing my college degree in television production, my existence and my worth were tied to a summer internship. I found one alumni connection who worked for a big network in Nashville and I shot my shot. In those days, internships were unpaid so if I was willing and able to make it work in Nashville for the summer, I got the job.
I fell in love with country music in the late 90s because of The Chicks, Shania, Faith, Tricia, and Martina. I would spend hours looking through mail-order CD magazines desperately wanting to get my hands on a copy. Or I would stay tuned to 107.3 just waiting for a favorite song to be played.1 So being given the opportunity as a 20-year-old girl to move to one of the genre’s biggest epicenters was the opportunity of my lifetime.
My privilege and the hard work of my parents afforded me the ability to find roommates through the local classifieds, sublet a $285/month room for the summer, and give my whole heart and soul to unpaid labor. Sure, looking back on it now it’s in many ways problematic to be a young, impressionable kid working 50+ hours a week for free with zero guarantee of a paying gig at the end. Still, truth be told, in the moment I was there willingly and passionately, living my dream.
That summer sealed the deal on Nashville for me. I had made enough connections to foster and hold onto some momentum to hit the proper job market immediately after college graduation. I also made friendships that not only gave me a place to live as soon as I moved there full-time, but are still to this day some of the most cherished people in my life.
It’s a long and winding story from there. I worked all the odd jobs to get by, I partied on Broadway, and then finally got my break to land a full-time music industry job. It was what 22-year-old dreams were made of. I gave my whole self to that job and learned so many of the foundational skills I still use today as a solopreneur. Then my dad tragically died and the shiny surface of that job and the industry as a whole started to wear off. I left on great terms with respected relationships and I went to sell stretchy pants and teach yoga. I had renewed passion and excitement for a new industry that helped me build a locally rooted community. Within all that, Lee Singer and I fell in love, started building a life together, and because being 26 and 28 had us feeling like real adults and being bold, we moved to California one month after getting married.
We left a place we loved, people and relationships we had invested years into. It was hard but we did it anyway. Yet after six months of being on the West Coast, as our original plans had begun to erode and morph into something we didn’t align with anymore, we sat at a beachside cafe2 and made the decision to move back to Nashville. We wrote a list of pros and cons to staying or going and what outweighed the PCH view was our friendships and community and the accessibility to an (at the time) affordable future.
Within one year of being back in Nashville, we opened our brick-and-mortar business and took off like a rocket ship as a husband and wife full-time small-business-owning duo.3 Having just finished the America’s Sweethearts Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders docuseries (edit/note post publication)4 on Netflix and seeing the alumni women talk about their glory days, right now at this point in my life, the times of ILY were my glory days.
We built something that was meaningful, together as a couple and alongside a dedicated team. And then, 2020 descended upon us. With a 4-month-old baby and a business that could really only thrive on in-person attendance, we made the heartbreaking decision to close up shop to preserve what little resources we had left.
The years that followed the initial pandemic lockdown were completed, as I’d suspect they were for a lot of us. Nashville changed. This vibrant, under-the-radar city that always felt like a small town was becoming a big, overexposed and bloated tacky tourist version of itself. I understand people and places change, and that it’s generally a good thing to grow and evolve. Yet as much as Nashville had given me (my young adulthood, my partner, my child, my community, my dreams), it was a place where I had lost so much (my dad, my faith in local leadership,5 my business, my dream). I rationally understand that many of these things are out of my control. It still felt disappointing and sad for me.
And so in 2023, we left Nashville again. It was about a year-long conversation to really make sure this was the move we wanted. I remember talking with a dear friend over breakfast, sharing with her that we were seriously considering making the move to leave. Her insight and wisdom reassured me that it’s ok to change our minds for the sake of growth. It’s ok to go somewhere new because while staking claim to a place forever is admirable, it’s also not always possible, whether that be by circumstances or by desires. We can outgrow places and leave them behind, while still knowing the stitching of our inner fabric contains threads that will never leave us.
I’m writing this on my back porch, watching birds fly by in the woods that surround our house. It’s quiet except for the sounds of nature. There are two cardinals, the state bird of Virginia which I now call home, dancing on our fence post. In this moment I miss nothing physically about Nashville. My nervous system has been delighted to fall asleep without the sounds of race cars and 18-wheelers. My physical body wakes up with no pain and no need to sit in traffic. Yet my heart misses my people, the friendships and the chosen family that slowly built a home in my heart over the course of 15 years.
I have this stark (but also maybe helpful?) knowing that building this next chapter of life in a new place, creating and fostering meaningful and impactful community connections, literally takes decades. And while there is no guarantee that it will last forever, I know what’s possible when I allow myself to settle into a place and give it my full heart.
wrote a recent post about Bad Advice vs. Good Wisdom and in it, she references the deeply moving words of Cheryl Strayed:I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.
As someone who (clearly) likes to live in a reflective and nostalgic place, I desperately need a reminder, or even permission, to acknowledge the past. And while Nashville wasn’t a total ghost ship for me, that journey did stop and I stepped onto a new shore. From here, as I continue to float and swim and tread in these new waters, I salute the Cumberland River for getting me this far.
If you connected with this or it felt relatable, giving it a “like” or sharing directly with a friend is so very appreciated. I post new entries once or twice a month and you can catch up on my other thoughts about boobs, mothering, the internet, and finding meaning in it all until the next one arrives. <3
Country music’s support of female artists has always been fraught and is a major problem IMO. During my formative years, there was a bit more airplay for women in country which led to, at least in my personal experience, more exposure to develop a love for this music. As this Billboard article explains: “The late ’90s and early ’00s appear to have been the most supportive of singles and albums from female singers; after that period, the gender composition of the year-end charts has been volatile.”
I mean, as much as California has just never been it for me, I cannot deny the draw and appeal to living life on the coast of the Pacific.
Please know there is so much more to this. Maybe one day that’s its own kind of essay. Things didn’t just happen with the snap of fingers. We worked our asses off and sat in couple’s therapy consistently for a year. It was a time that was giving “I cry a lot but I am so productive.” realness.
I totally missed adding a note here when I originally posted this. Wowee zowee, what a show. The coded language, the impossible standards, the sadness, the cult of it all?! Shewww.
has a fantastic episode that distills down all the things with smart and poignant observations. Highly recommend!To be clear, Virginia isn’t some magical progressive land either. As
recently wrote: “So far this year we’ve seen Republican Governors in states like Virginia veto legislation that establishes a right to contraception, and Senate Republicans blocked a bill that would codify the right to contraception.“
hey emmy, anne here, and old ILY regular. I found myself missing ILY, so I went on IG and found you to see what you were up to, coincidentally around the time you posted. I have very similar feelings when it comes to IG, and am contemplating what I call another “off season”. I’m glad I found your Substack, and appreciate your words here! (And obviously, very grateful for my season at ILY)
♥️♥️♥️