On Indianapolis
The root of my identity was questioned at a party on Halloween night in the latter half of my twentieth year. My friend was circling the room with questions and when it came to my turn, she asked me, “How does the way you perceive yourself complement or conflict with the way others see you?” I thought long and hard about this as Halloweentown carried on harmoniously with the crunch of candy corn and kit kat bars, but to bring myself to an answer was to reconcile with a hard truth. There was something unsettling in the intersection between these two ideals; how someone close to me may not understand me in the way that I thought–or even worse–I might not understand me. I wanted desperately to be known by the narratives I constructed and by the stories I told myself; to be misunderstood was a hollow way to live.
Perhaps this fear was accentuated in my youth by the lazy bars and boarded up windows that characterized my home of downtown Indianapolis, a city that could never quite make a name for itself. When the average person thinks of Indianapolis, Indiana, they usually don’t have an image in mind. Maybe they’ll think of the Indy 500 and how Lady Gaga sang the national anthem last year, or how it was the set for the 1986 movie Hoosiers. Indy has undergone a slew of slogans, like “Crossroads of America” due to its geography, or “Naptown” and “India-no-place” because of its sleepy streets, but nothing has been able to stick. I grew up on the eastside of Indianapolis, a place shadowed by the smell of marijuana outside the gas stations and crumbling asphalt on the way to the projects. The street I drove to school was overrun with chain restaurants and money lending services with little signs of local life. As it turns out, Indianapolis is the number one test market for fast food chains because of how ordinary it is. It’s a city that doesn’t have some grandiose narrative or alluring tourist attractions; it’s just that–ordinary.
In the hallways and classrooms of my high school I began to define myself in opposition to ordinariness. I thought of myself as a character in one of the YA dystopian novels I repeatedly read. I filled my schedule to the point of exhaustion, making myself known as an orchestra kid, a cross country runner, an Honors student, a songwriter. If I thought of myself as an involved, successful, talented person, maybe others would begin to too. In the daily rhythms of classes and extracurriculars, a pattern emerged: the moments in which I felt most known had nothing to do with these identities I’d crafted. I felt the most loved when my mother told me I listened well in our conversations over coffee. I felt most valued when my friend told me that my words of encouragement anchored him through a tough time. Being known came through the careful attention of others.
In the same way, the narrative of Indianapolis wasn’t made known to me until I actually looked for it. It wasn’t until I took the wrong turn downtown on a Friday night that I discovered the monthly art crawls that would breathe life into my experience of the city. It wasn’t until I decided to try a new run path that I realized Indiana has some of the best local parks in the country. Whether or not Indianapolis has a national identity or not is of little importance; it’s special because of the vegan restaurant I frequented with my mom after every orthodontist appointment, because of the tiny park neighboring the White River where I escaped to find true solitude. It’s special because of the breakfast diner behind my grandparent’s house with the waitress who always greets me with a firm handshake and a crooked smile. What makes Indianapolis extraordinary is its ordinariness. In all of its mundane shop corners and its abundance of chain restaurants, Indianapolis was where I built my first community. In response to the question of “What should young people do with their lives today?” Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
I still can’t perfectly articulate how I perceive myself compared to how others do, but when I think back to that question on Halloween night, I’m not so scared to answer it. To marry these two perceptions requires a shift in how I see myself from a musician and a student to a woman, a daughter, a friend–to hold closely and highly what makes me ordinary. Attention is another name for love, and you can be truly known when attention is poured into the cracks and crevices of who you are, the parts that are separate from your outward accomplishments or the flimsy identities you craft for yourself.
My city is ordinary, and so am I. But the greatest sense of home comes from knowing people love me in spite of my ordinariness, a love not derivative of usefulness. It is a state of being where, if stripped of all of my outward identities, someone would still want a life of laundry and taxes with me. Indianapolis was that home for me. And my next home will travel to wherever that love is found.
