open letter #6, dear anonymous

From the comments of my previous Open Letter

Anonymous said...

Dear Blogger,

I feel your pain. The solution is to find another city to love. You can give all your youth, energy and passion to Cleveland, and it will bleed you dry. Yes, Cleveland has some interesting aspects to it, I myself have always enjoyed Cinematheque, Westside Market, the Orchestra, etc.; however, it is the attitude of people and the overall economic climate that cannot overcome a couple of hotspots. Move on and move up.

Dear Anonymous,

That's easy for you to say. I wonder what constitutes "moving on" and "moving up." Is that the Sunbelt, the East Coast, the West Coast, Chicago? I wonder where you grew up, and what shaped you and where you are now.

Yes, there is a lot of unemployment and despair. But I don't think that we're unique in that regard. That's a good chunk of our country right there. And when I hear people talk who've moved out and moved on, they don't seem that much happier because happiness is not where you live or what you have.

I've never been all that ambitious. If I was, I would have left long ago. I've never cared about moving on or moving up. One of my friends lived in DC for a few years and she said it was horrible because even though there were all these amazing things going on everywhere, she had no one to hang out with and it just made the loneliness worse.

At this point, I'm surrounded by such a great crew of friends and family. We don't need much to be entertained. Give us some cans of Arizona and a five-dollar pizza and we'll hang out all night. We love cultural events and history and going out, but that's not why we exist. That gets pointless too.

This is the place where God has put me, and I'm content here. I could be happy somewhere else but there's a part of me that's inevitably drawn to places that people write off. My heart breaks for this city, but it'd break if I was in Chicago or DC or Seattle too. I'm sure that I could live almost anywhere if I could find a sense of community and people who are real, but right now, here is where it's at.