The Hero, Unmasked: Coming to Terms With Chicago
I didn’t always want to live in a city. As a South Floridian from a mid-sized town, the idea of being a small fish with no friends in a big pond of strangers felt overwhelming. My aspirations didn’t necessitate moving to a large, urban area: I wasn’t a business prodigy with my eyes on conquering the financial district, and, on the other end of the spectrum, I didn’t find the starving artist lifestyle appealing. It also didn’t seem like a wise choice financially. I mean, Florida has no state income tax. And the weather…
A hard choice is made easy when it feels like you’ve got nothing left to lose, however. I decided to make the move and hopped on a plane two very short weeks later. With just my carry-on in hand, I walked out of O’Hare Airport and started what would become my life as a Chicagoan.
Unlike most of the people I met in my travels through the city, I wasn’t born in the surrounding suburbs, and I didn’t move to Chicago to finish school or because of a job. I just showed up. Like a stray cat following her nose, I wandered up to Chicago’s doorstep and found that someone had left food out for me. After feeling insatiable for some time, it was the best thing I had ever tasted.
Those first few months were a fragile balance of fear and excitement as I explored the city and tried to find my people and my place. It was daunting, particularly because I had no set agenda or purpose for each day. I was by myself eighty percent of the time. But no matter how cold or tired or broke I was, I loved every moment. Every day, I gained or learned something, met a new person, or checked an event or restaurant off of my lengthy to-do list. Seasonal depression couldn’t touch me, and the only limitation I felt was that of my credit line.
I did all of the requisite tourist activities. I took a water taxi, sat in the glass box on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower, walked through the Pedway, saw The Bean. I smiled to myself when I got a Ventra card, and beamed when I registered it. But I quickly started to search out interests that I thought real Chicagoans shared. I wore a short skirt and heels on my first Halloween, laughing with my new friends as we froze in the slush outside of a Wicker Park club, frantically trying to wave down a taxi in the crowd. I went to Taste of Chicago, saw an emerging artist at the Empty Bottle, participated in several themed bar crawls in Wrigleyville, did a fun run at Soldier Field in the snow, started following the Cubs and the Bulls. I drank, and I drank it all in. Once, during my first summer, I was walking to my then-boyfriend’s Lakeview apartment from a night out. It was late — and a weeknight — but warm and breezy, and the sidewalks were peppered with friends and couples. I remember thinking that this place was absolutely magical. Chicago was an endless opportunity, and I would never, ever stop loving it.
Much like the Darling children in Peter Pan or the kid with the bell from The Polar Express, however, I found that the magic of the city started to fade with time and age. The problems of the city and a life within it amplified, and it became harder to believe in my personal, pure rendition of Chicago.
In Palm Beach County, the front page of any newspaper is dominated by national headlines and updates on area Ponzi schemes but must quickly turn to local fluff stories to fill out the publication. In Cook County, there is no shortage of stories on abuse of power in the government, homicides, racial tensions, indictments, increases in taxes, decreases in public funding, and severe weather warnings. I don’t remember exactly when I started to really read and follow these stories, but it was a short jump from priding myself on being an informed citizen to feeling disappointed in and upset by what was — and had been — happening all around me in the city I thought I understood so well.
Once I started really looking, the deeply-etched flaws in Chicago’s surface couldn’t be unseen. The questionable dispersal of city funds and wealth in general was so overt that it was nauseating. My beloved North Side, with its densely-populated neighborhoods filled with numerous food, shopping, and housing options, seemed whitewashed and oblivious to the financial and safety concerns of the rest of the city. I saw storefronts in all neighborhoods vacant for months as rising rent pushed out the old tenants and failed to attract new and beneficial inhabitants. The CTA lines were reflective of just how marginalized the West and South Sides were, and the unending construction was impossible to ignore. “Building a New Chicago,” signs around the city proudly declared. But when, and for whom?
It was a feeling akin to realizing that your parents aren’t perfect. That the comfortable lifestyle I had been enjoying was the result of a long line of mass-scale inequality. The glass had been shattered. My construction of Chicago was not everyone’s reality, and I felt that the city’s history and leadership relied on actions that now seemed indefensible.
Equally difficult was realizing just how much my definition of myself depended on how I defined the city I chose to move to. What was once an unknown yet exciting possibility had become a relentless challenge that continuously chipped away at my spirit and my bank account. Like Lot’s wife in the Book of Genesis, I had looked back when I should’ve just kept going forward and subsequently turned to a block of salt, soured and immobilized by what I found. Who am I now? What purpose do I serve? Does what I do here matter to myself or the city or the other two million people who inhabit it?
The sobering truth is that most people do not and will not care what I do with my life in Chicago, at least until it affects them, negatively or otherwise. The same is more or less true for everyone else here. That realization was heartbreaking in an utterly unique way. Afterwards, I had to make a conscious decision and effort to keep loving and caring about the future of the place that I had, up to that point, been enthusiastically calling my “adopted hometown.”
Part of love is reconciling that the people and things you love aren’t perfect. They’re going to hurt you, probably not on purpose, but because your characters or beliefs are fundamentally different in some way. The city is going to do what it’s always done: keep being, staunchly rooted in place on the western shores of Lake Michigan. I have to stop trying to rewrite what has been and push forward with what can be. I have to stop validating my sense of belonging by justifying it to those looking into Chicago rather than to those living within it. What is the alternative?
