Nobody Here Knows Me Yet

I am currently reconciling with my ability to be a stranger. I've always been known.

Growing up in my family's generational hometown, I was my father's daughter before I was anything else. People knew how to spell my last name as soon as I referenced my family business. Teachers recognized it before I sat down. I was known before I'd had a chance to decide what being known meant.

There's some comfort in that, I won't pretend otherwise. To be legible to a place, and walk in a room already belong there? That's not nothing.

But it also means you never quite get to be mysterious, to obscure jagged edges. You don't have a choice, starting from scratch, on who you are to someone before they've already heard something about you.

I thought college might change that. Spoilers, it did not. I arrived with a gaggle of alumni from my high school, which meant I couldn't even lie about inventing Post-its. My permanent record followed me, like all the school administrators of yore said it would.

The first time I was ever truly dropped into the unknown was going to study abroad. My university had no formal program there. No cohort, I was the only person from my school on the continent. They drove me to the city, and not entirely metaphorically, left me on the side of the road. Good luck, figure it out.

And I did. But no one had a file on me there, no name brand recognition. Just an immigrant with decent Spanish trying to absorb a new world.

What a gift it was. To shed parts of me that didn't quite feel right, honing me down to my core in another language. It felt honest, in a way I had never felt before. To be new to myself, and others.

I came home and eventually landed in DC, where I spent a decade building a different kind of known.

It is a city of nerds and niche references. I found myself through the most conventional means available: my job. And through seven jobs and four administrations, it's a place that assimilates you slowly without necessarily asking for permission.

Proximity and repetition do the work. You don't choose your Craigslist roommate so much as survive them, and then one day you realize you'd do anything for them. The file builds itself while you're busy living inside it.

DC knew me by accumulation. By showing up enough times that eventually I was just there, woven in. A decade of context, debates, and people who had been present for enough of it that I didn't have to explain myself from the beginning every time.

You don't notice what that's worth until you leave.

Boston doesn't quite know I exist yet.

I forget that sometimes, and will casually drop lore here and there.

Here I'm not my family, poetry club president, a policy nerd, or any of the accumulated versions I've been leaving behind in towns and cities for the last three decades.

I'm just whoever I decide to lead with.

The most famous bar in this city was built on the premise that everybody knows your name. I walked past it this week on a leisurely stroll — which in a city of runners was a literal uphill battle. I thought about what it would feel like to actually want that again.

But I'm not sure I do anymore.

In my slow rebuild of a new life, I'm finding that the two things I had previously conflated are actually very different. There's a difference between being seen and being known. My hometown knew me by inheritance, Buenos Aires through controlled circumstances, DC in the work.

Being seen is something else. It requires someone, deciding on purpose that they want to know. Choosing to see the now as presented on this particular day, not the decades of texture layered in.

It's possible here. I don't entirely know what to do with it yet.

But I'm learning.

Thank you for reading, for seeing me today.

Sometimes this feels like a diary, but I hope earns a place in your morning anyway.

Until soon,

Sarah