“Well, I’ve had occasion to become acquainted with it over the years because I have family not far away, and I found it to be a beautiful city with lots to offer …”

At that point, there is usually a tilt of the head and a “huh,” as if to say, Interesting. Are we talking about the same Hartford?

To locals and non-locals alike, Hartford seems to have unfortunately garnered a negative reputation. It is seen as high-crime, high-poverty, and a place people go only to work.

But the more I learn about Hartford, the more I have come to think its reputation cannot be understood simply by looking at contemporary crime and poverty statistics. To understand why Hartford looks the way it does—or more aptly why people think about it the way they do—you have to look backward.

It is true that Hartford has a relatively high crime rate. Its violent crime rate remains considerably higher than both the state and national averages. But it is also true that crime has been trending significantly downward in recent years. In 2025, Hartford recorded half as many homicides as it had the year before.

So it isn’t about objective data alone.

What we see today is, in part, the sequelae of prior periods of discriminatory urban planning and inequitably distributed economic stimulus.

There is an exhibit on the basement floor of the Old State House that chronicles the population of two downtown neighborhood streets beginning in the 1930s, along with what can be gleaned about their residents: their names, their backgrounds, where they came from.

It shows a growing and increasingly diverse population year after year until, one year around 1960, the population drops from hundreds to zero.

It never regains a single resident.

This was the effect of urban renewal—the urban-planning philosophy that prevailed at the time and was built around an increasingly dominant vision of metropolitan life: families in the suburbs, commuters arriving by automobile, and downtowns remade as modern centers of commerce.

This was also the era of the shopping mall—the one-story, sprawling warehouses of chain stores surrounded by notoriously accident-prone seas of parking—that helped put downtown merchants out of business. In many urban environments, you can still see the ornate historic buildings that once housed a Porteous or a Woolworth’s but now cycle through tenants every few years or sit vacant, awaiting an investor with the capital and imagination to give them life again.

Highways were built en masse, and the locations deemed most expedient often ran directly through urban centers. It did not matter that they severed contiguous neighborhoods or divided cities from their bodies of water.

That’s when Hartford saw the construction of I-84 and I-91. I-84 cut through established neighborhoods; I-91 effectively separated downtown Hartford from the Connecticut River.

The federal government, meanwhile, made funding available to address “blight”—a word applied to neighborhoods characterized by poverty, aging buildings, and disinvestment. Plans to acquire entire low-income neighborhoods by eminent domain, demolish them, and erect the modern city in their place were backed by federal grants.

Such was the fate of the residents on those two downtown Hartford streets.

Urban renewal was a trend that swept the nation. It happened everywhere. But in Hartford, it seems to have been especially damaging—and especially difficult to reverse in later decades, when urban planning began embracing reconnecting neighborhoods, walkability, urban livability, and, in many respects, undoing the damage created by urban renewal.

Hartford’s population peaked at 177,397 in 1950. By 1970, it had fallen to 158,017—a loss of nearly 20,000 residents.

But the Hartford region was not shrinking.

While the central city lost population, surrounding towns grew explosively. Bloomfield grew from fewer than 6,000 residents in 1950 to more than 18,000 in 1970. Simsbury nearly tripled in population. South Windsor grew nearly fourfold.

The people and wealth were not simply disappearing. They were being geographically redistributed.

Hartford effectively put all of its economic eggs in one basket, so to speak, at least when it came to downtown. Increasingly, there were fewer residents and fewer reasons for visitors to linger. There were employees of the major corporations whose physical footprints dominated the skyline—Travelers, Aetna and others.

Those workers could sustain a good number of lunch counters and happy hours and keep businesses open during the workday. But even in the booming times, a commuter population could not support the full range of businesses that make a neighborhood habitable—grocers, laundromats and other everyday services.

And they were especially ill equipped when circumstances changed.

A pandemic sent office workers home and permanently accelerated an era of remote and hybrid work. The downtown economic model that had already depended heavily on commuters suddenly had far fewer commuters.

Intersecting with the era of urban renewal was another massive transformation: the postwar suburban housing boom.

The GI Bill was passed in 1944. Among other benefits, it provided returning veterans with access to federally backed home loans, helping millions of Americans buy houses and accelerating a dramatic expansion of homeownership and suburban development.

It is rightly remembered as one of the great engines of upward mobility in American history.

But access to that upward mobility was not equally distributed.

Although the benefits were federal, they operated through a decentralized system of banks, real-estate markets, educational institutions, and state and local actors that remained deeply embedded in racial discrimination. Redlining and other discriminatory housing policies were widespread. Black veterans could qualify for benefits on paper while finding themselves unable to obtain mortgages in Black neighborhoods and excluded from buying homes in white suburban developments.

White families, meanwhile, had far greater access to the new suburban housing stock and the generational wealth that came with homeownership.

White flight accelerated further as legal segregation weakened and Black families gained greater access to neighborhoods and schools from which they had previously been excluded.

The result was not simply suburbanization.

When you disinvest in downtown neighborhoods and incentivize those with means to leave for suburbs where they can access even greater wealth, the result is a reorganized segregation along racial, economic, and geographic lines.

The disparity between Connecticut’s urban cities and many of their surrounding suburbs remains particularly striking.

This, as I see it, is still at the center of Hartford’s reputational stigma.

With disinvestment and segregation come concentrated poverty and, often, higher crime rates. Those conditions then become visible characteristics of the city and are treated as evidence of something inherent about the place, rather than as the downstream consequences of decisions made over generations.

The stigma becomes self-reinforcing.

And yet, in the decades before urban renewal, Hartford was an extraordinarily prosperous city, home to a concentration of insurance, manufacturing, and financial wealth that left behind an architectural legacy wildly disproportionate to the city’s present size.

All that infrastructure is still here.

There are the historic brick and brownstone buildings lining the back streets around Bushnell Park, the grand ornate details of theaters and government buildings.

The State Capitol is an exuberant piece of High Victorian Gothic architecture, crowded with statues, arches, towers, and a shining gold dome rising above the park.

There is public art everywhere.

There is a sculpture walk. A sculpture garden. A mural renaissance yielding such a prolific collection of enormous, colorful images rendered on high-rise walls that I doubt anyone could offer an accurate count.

I used to assume Chicago was the public-art capital of the country. But all it takes is opening your eyes in Hartford to wonder whether it might actually be right here.

And more contemporary urban planning has worked to incorporate some of those corporate plazas into pedestrian thoroughfares that wind toward the flood barrier and the lantern-lined Riverwalk along the Connecticut River—attempting, in pieces, to reconnect a city with the river from which an earlier generation of planners separated it.

There is now an aesthetically striking interplay between historic brick and brownstone and reflecting blue and gold towers that defines the skyline.

That’s the beauty I was drawn to.

When acquaintances seem puzzled by my enthusiasm, I remind them of these things.

“There are the cultural festivals at Bushnell Park and Mortensen Plaza, and salsa night at the Pratt Street pedestrian block …”

I see them nod.

“That’s true. I guess I really haven’t spent much time exploring downtown lately.”

And there it is.

It is impossible to outline all of the above in a thirty-second conversation about why I moved to Hartford. But with each interaction, I’m working on perfecting a concise spiel that might have the effect of dispelling a little stigma and restoring a little pride in place.

Because I believe I am at the forefront of a trend here—a trend in which Hartford is seen again not just for its beauty, but for its livability: its walkable streets, its compact proximity between library, museums, parks, employers, eateries, public spaces, and more.

It is already happening.

You can see it all around.

Cities inherit reputations just as surely as they inherit highways, buildings, and street grids. Those reputations can outlive the circumstances that created them. And perhaps, like the physical city itself, they can be rebuilt.

For my part, I’ll continue my ambassadorship. I can’t help it, really.

And I suspect that, in some subtle way, I’m changing minds—starting ripples with each brief connection.

It’s designed to be beginner-friendly and social. I met a few new people. The route was only 2.7 miles, and I managed to keep up with the front group throughout. I was pleased with this result since my goal was simply not to lose sight of at least one person who seemed to know the route.

I’ll go back next week.

Running has turned out to be the longest-sustained passion of my life. It’s a habit that has stuck with me longer than any job or any boyfriend.

There’s some irony in this because running is an exceedingly easy thing to dislike.

When someone tells me, “I’ll ride a bike and lift weights, but running? I just hate running,” I think: Yeah. I get it. Running sucks.

At its most basic, you’re voluntarily inducing tachycardia and hyperventilation and then trying to keep doing it for an extended period of time. It doesn’t hurt in quite the same way strength-focused exercise does. There isn’t necessarily that burning muscle feeling. Running is just…uncomfortable.

Thus, my overarching approach to running has always been to push hard enough to reap the health benefits, but never so hard that I absolutely hate it. If that means slowing down and walking the uphills, so be it. If some days it means choosing an extra-short route because three miles sounds intolerable but two sounds manageable, I run two.

That may explain why, even after running somewhere between 12 and 25 miles per week for most of the last twelve years, I still don’t truly consider myself a “runner.”

Runners are those people whose minutes-per-mile averages are in the sevens and eights and who enter marathons. That’s not me. I find myself entered in shorter races mostly by virtue of someone else’s urging, to contribute to a particular cause, or because there happens to be a race occurring in a location and on a date when I was planning to run anyway.

I don’t run to achieve athletic-level fitness or to break my personal best.

I run because it is probably the single most effective method of managing stress I’ve ever found.

Running is the physical practice of sustaining discomfort over time.

In my years serving in elected office, I came to think of myself as something like a stress food processor. Stress could be piled upon my shoulders seemingly endlessly, and somehow I would just process it.

Doing so required learning to live with stress for a period of time almost as a companion.

Maybe there was an item on Monday’s Council agenda for which I was recruiting votes. The outcome mattered intensely to me. I would be expected to make a public statement from the dais before the vote.

The preceding weekend, I’d go about my usual routines carrying that stress on my shoulder. I’d get groceries. Clean the house. Go for a run. The unresolved thing would simply be there alongside me.

Eventually Monday night would come and pass. The agenda item would be called. I would say whatever I had spent the weekend knowing I would have to say. The vote would happen, and with it would come a sense of release.

But until then, there was no getting rid of the stress. There was only figuring out how to let it be a temporary accompaniment without allowing it to take over.

Running trains you for exactly this.

This is uncomfortable.

I don’t need to make it comfortable.

I just need to keep going.

I used my breath a lot tonight. Somehow I always feel like the loudest huffer and puffer out there. I suck the air in actively and push it audibly back out, settling into a rhythm that can keep me moving at a steady pace long after another part of my brain has begun suggesting that walking might be nice.

Breathing doesn’t make running comfortable. It makes the discomfort sustainable.

And there was a second kind of discomfort tonight. I was running through a city I moved to only a month ago, surrounded entirely by people I didn’t know, following a route I didn’t know.

There is no way to make that unfamiliarity disappear all at once, either.

I can’t say that the social experience went swimmingly. It was uncomfortable at moments, for sure. I had a couple of fun conversations. I also stood alone for a while, wishing I were more charismatic or approachable or bold enough to do the approaching. I didn’t leave with a new best friend.

I could easily just not go back. But running has taught me that the point is not to eliminate discomfort. If it’s not this discomfort, there’s always another one waiting just behind it. The point is to learn to live in peace with it.

You show up. You tolerate the awkwardness of being new. You introduce yourself to someone. You run 2.7 miles. You come back the following Tuesday and do it again.

Maybe next week, or maybe a month down the road, somewhere in that repetition waits friendship and belonging.

I put my trust in that.

The refrain we ask each other.

The damp summer air in the Connecticut River Valley penetrates our pores as it feeds the lush foliage in the early evening sun. We walk for miles each day exploring our new landscape.

Sunset’s not for several hours still, and this year, for the first time, we don’t wonder if August will usher in an early fall. We left that in Northern New England. All that is still far off on the horizon.

The question masks the reassurances for which it begs. Did we make the right choice? Do you have any regrets?

The late-day sun backlights the city skyline. We pause after crossing under the arches at the Phoenix Gateway Bridge while I snap a silhouette shot, the streaming sun between the towers casting long shadows on the brick pathway.

Last fall I imagined gazing down from inside one of those buildings—maybe from the seventeenth floor—through a window in an office that, in my fantasy, was my own. Maybe it was winter after five on a weekday, and though the sky was dark, the city was lit up with activity in every intimate corner.

Those days saw the early manifestations of the here and now. We lived with uncertainty for so long. Wishing and hoping and not knowing.

It is only 1.3 miles to Riverside Park from our new front door, taking the route through Old State House Square, up and over Constitution Plaza, down the eighty-six steps from Mortensen Plaza to the Riverwalk.

As the trail opens up to the park, silver maples, cottonwoods and elms form a high canopy wrapped in climbing ivy. I try to soften my eyes, as if the view could be let in as through an open gate, and thus more fully experienced and held in my perception.

We rest by taking seats on the swings, vacated for the moment by any children. They droop so low to the ground that the length of my femur cannot clear them to pump my legs the way they used to as a kid, and the seat hugs my hips uncomfortably tight.

The answer is always yes, for both of us.

“Yes, I am happy.”

It wasn’t some grand savior we sought in the first place.

Just a new platform.

Just a life scaled to suit the future we envision.

A city a little bit bigger, a little bit taller.

Greater square footage per dollar.

Enough room to live together in ease and comfort.

“Yes, I am very happy.”

Our refrain of assurance to each other that it is what we hoped it would be, and we came here together, and we wish to stay.

“Are you going to get married someday?”

“Are you going to have kids?”

It’s an odd thing, when you stop to think about it, to ask a six-year-old girl about her plans for reproduction. Yet such are our cultural norms.

My answer was always the same.

“No.”

Even then, I sensed there was something delicate about that response, as though I had inadvertently challenged an article of faith. The adults would blink, smile politely, and reassure me.

“You’ll change your mind.”

Through my twenties, the questions continued. My answer never changed, but the response evolved.

“Well, you still have time.”

Then, somewhere in my mid-thirties, people simply stopped asking. I imagine that now they sometimes walk away from pleasant conversations with me quietly wondering how such a nice, seemingly well-adjusted woman somehow missed the boat to happiness.

It has become less socially acceptable to ask women why they chose not to have children. I understand why.

Choices are affirmative acts. We choose what we do, not everything we decline to do.

When we order dinner at a restaurant, we don’t explain why we rejected every item on the menu. We simply order the dish that appealed to us. The waiter doesn’t expect us to justify our refusal of the salmon, the risotto, the pasta, and the steak before serving the vegetable curry.

The fact that we feel compelled to ask women why they didn’t have children reveals that motherhood is treated as the default from which deviations require explanation.

Looking back, my own reasoning was manifold, but I see it as primarily influenced by uncertainty over what the future would look like.

I never wanted motherhood for myself, but I also never found myself wrestling with the question. The answer always felt strangely obvious.

Notably, I don’t mistake my own certainty for universality. Many women arrive at parenthood through circumstances far more complicated than my own. My experience was simply that the question never felt difficult because the answer had settled itself long before adulthood.

Only later did I begin to understand why.

In second grade, we learned about endangered species.

I remember sitting at my desk in the orange-carpeted classroom at Henry L. Cottrell School when the teacher explained that polar bears might someday disappear because of what humans were doing to the planet.

It struck me with surprising force.

Surely we would fix this, I thought. We were intelligent. We lived in a prosperous democracy. Of course we wouldn’t simply allow magnificent animals to vanish because changing our own behavior proved inconvenient.

Yet that lesson planted a realization that has never quite left me.

Our society was capable of understanding a moral problem with perfect clarity while remaining collectively incapable of solving it.

The polar bears became, in my mind, a symbol of something much larger.

As I grew older, more pieces accumulated around that first realization. Climate change. Resource depletion. Endless wars. Democratic backsliding. Economic instability. My generation was repeatedly told that we would likely inherit less wealth than our parents, that upward mobility was slowing, and that environmental conditions were deteriorating.

Somewhere along the way—without consciously realizing it—my strategy became less about building an expanding future than preparing for a narrowing one.

I wanted enough education to support myself.

Enough financial stability to remain independent.

Enough flexibility to adapt if circumstances worsened.

Dependents represented risk for both of us. They might compromise my own security, and I might not be able to offer them the kind of flourishing future every parent hopes to provide.

It was never the whole story, but it underpinned much of it.

This narrowing-world view shaped more than my thoughts about children.

I never wanted to marry, either.

Part of that was philosophical. I have long objected to an institution whose history is inseparable from treating women as property. Even acknowledging that marriage has evolved, I never wished to bind my life to a legal contract that could become emotionally and financially expensive to unwind.

I developed an almost irrational dislike of car ownership.

Cars seemed like expensive, depreciating necessities that tied people to systems of consumption I wanted to minimize. Instead, I gravitated toward cities where walking, public spaces, and density offered another way to live.

Looking back, these weren’t isolated preferences.

They were expressions of the same worldview.

I occasionally read articles about the growing number of adults who choose not to have children. The explanations often emphasize freedom: more travel, more career opportunities, more disposable income, more time for hobbies.

Those are certainly real advantages.

But I suspect that, for at least some, those benefits are secondary.

Perhaps beneath them lies something more fundamental: an intuitive response to a future that feels less secure than the one previous generations expected.

That was certainly true for me.

One of the great surprises of my life is that believing the future may become more difficult has never prevented me from finding joy in the present.

If anything, it has sharpened my appreciation for it.

I notice architecture.

I wander unfamiliar cities.

I spend time composing photographs.

I run.

I practice yoga.

I read novels.

I continue studying in midlife.

I build friendships.

I write.

Meaning, I’ve come to believe, does not depend upon confidence that history bends toward a happy ending.

It depends upon acting according to one’s values regardless.

I think about a moment from fifth grade.

I was playing chess against a boy who was older and considerably more practiced than I was. Another classmate wandered over, looked at the board, and asked whether I’d like some help.

“Okay,” he said. “You may be going down, but you’re going down fighting.”

Those words have come to mind countless times since. In fact, I’ve come to think of them as a kind of accidental philosophy.

Much of my civic life was spent advocating for policies that were obvious uphill battles. I didn’t choose them because success was guaranteed, but because they were worth attempting. Even unsuccessful efforts can move public conversation a little farther down the road for the next generation.

Meaning is in the doing.

These days, I never wonder whether I made the right decision about having children.

It never felt like choosing between happiness and sacrifice.

It felt like the path that made moral and practical sense to me, given the world as I understood it.

This was the path for me.

Whether my early impressions about the future ultimately prove accurate or not, I still believe what I have always believed.

We don’t control whether civilization ultimately bends upward or downward.

We control only whether we spend our time contributing to the version of the world we believe ought to exist.

For me, that has always been enough.

In preparing for the move, I’d already been reading about Connecticut’s electoral system. It differs from Maine’s in fascinating ways. Connecticut has fusion voting—a method unfamiliar to me as a lifelong Mainer that allows multiple parties to endorse the same candidate. It elects several constitutional officers, such as Secretary of the State and Attorney General, whom we appoint through the Legislature in Maine. Hartford has a strong-mayor form of government and an entirely at-large city council. Connecticut is not a referendum state, a feature of direct democracy that I have long appreciated and defended in Maine.

But those weren’t the differences that gave me pause.

For the first time in more than twenty years, I found myself reconsidering a question I hadn’t really asked since I first became eligible to vote:

What party should I register with?

The answer came surprisingly easily.

I remained a Green.

It’s one of those things, much like becoming a vegetarian, that I adopted into my identity years ago. At some point it stopped feeling like a preference and simply became part of who I am. I am a Green.

There are probably only a handful of people who have been registered Green continuously since the day they first registered to vote. Most Green Party members arrived there from somewhere else. I never did.

I don’t have a specific memory of discovering the Green Party, but looking back, I think I know where it happened.

I attended Evergreen Sudbury School, a democratically run, self-directed private school where I spent what would otherwise have been my high school years. Students ranged in age from four to nineteen. There were no grades, no required curriculum, and no classes unless someone chose to organize one. Students and staff governed the school together, each with an equal vote. We debated budgets, policies, and rules. We resolved disputes through a judicial process. Learning was driven not by assignments but by curiosity.

Looking back, I think Evergreen shaped much of the way I still approach the world. It taught me to question systems rather than simply accept them. To challenge authority when necessary. To defend ideas because they withstand scrutiny, not because they’re popular. To think independently.

Years later—long after graduating, college, and beginning my career—I learned something I hadn’t known as a student. One of the staff members had been opening the school each week after hours so the Maine Green Party could hold its meetings there.

Suddenly, a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

For much of my twenties, my name was almost synonymous with the Green Party. I served as chair of the Maine Green Party, chaired the Portland Green Party committee, recruited candidates around the state, and organized caucuses. When I ran for Portland Charter Commission—my first elected office—I remember arriving at work one morning to congratulations from a coworker who had already read the morning paper.

The Portland Press Herald had endorsed me.

I was astonished. The paper certainly wasn’t known for endorsing Greens. But when I read the editorial, I realized they weren’t endorsing me despite my party affiliation. They were endorsing the idea that the Green minority deserved a seat at the table.

That observation has stayed with me.

Twelve cumulative years in municipal elected office gradually changed how people saw me. My closest political allies were usually members of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. We spent our time governing, not talking about party labels. I suspect many people eventually forgot—or perhaps never knew—that I was still registered Green.

But my values hadn’t changed.

When I filled out that voter registration form in Connecticut, my decision wasn’t based on strategy, coalition-building, or which party seemed most electorally viable. It came down to the same thing it always has: values.

The Green Party is built around what it calls the Ten Key Values:

Grassroots Democracy

Social Justice and Equal Opportunity

Ecological Wisdom

Nonviolence

Decentralization

Community-Based Economics

Feminism and Gender Equity

Respect for Diversity

Personal and Global Responsibility

Future Focus and Sustainability

Over the years I had many opportunities to carpool with and spend time around John Rensenbrink, one of the founders of the Green movement in Maine. One idea he returned to often—in his writing and in conversation—was that the way we treat one another cannot be separated from the way we treat the natural world. Those are not two different moral questions. They are one.

That idea has stayed with me.

What has always drawn me to the Green Party is not any particular policy position. Policies evolve. Circumstances change. What has endured is the framework itself. The Ten Key Values aren’t, to me, merely a platform. They are a way of thinking—a set of first principles from which political judgments can be made. They remind me to think systematically about democracy, community, justice, and our relationship with the world that sustains us.

Perhaps that’s why, after all these years, the answer still feels so obvious.

Moving to Connecticut meant filling out a new voter registration card. But it didn’t change the values that determined which box I checked.

After more than twenty years, checking that box still felt like coming home.

The people who reach out to make sure they see you one last time before you leave are the ones who occupy a special and enduring place in your life.

Jacqui has known me through what now feel like several different lifetimes.

I don’t think of myself as the same person I was when I met her in my mid-twenties on a summer afternoon in Kennebunk. We met inside a Green Party tent before joining a peace march toward George W. Bush’s summer property, carrying a simple message: bring the troops home from Iraq.

In recent years we’ve seen each other less than we once did. My organizing gradually gave way to elected office, and we no longer saw one another as often. But some friendships don’t depend on frequency. They become part of the architecture of your life. Even now, if I’m headed to an event I know she’d enjoy—and if I have a car—I instinctively think to ask if she’d like a ride.

Tonight we talked about the Green Party, about Hartford, and about what comes next.

One of the things I’ve always appreciated about Jacqui is her steadiness. She has held fast to a set of values while the political mainstream has increasingly treated many of those same values as radical: peace, human dignity, loyalty, compassion. As other conversations have become exercises in careful wording and strategic omissions, ours have remained refreshingly direct. There is a comfort in being able to speak plainly with someone who understands not only your conclusions but the moral framework that produced them.

When dinner was over, we hugged goodbye.

Then I turned to our server and told him that this would probably be my last visit before moving to Hartford.

I’ve been a near-weekly regular at Thai Tree since around 2008. Through multiple apartments, jobs, relationships, and elected offices, Friday evenings have often ended there. Their food is exceptional, and as a vegetarian I’ve always loved that one of their protein options is a soy nugget—a welcome departure from the ubiquitous tofu offered almost everywhere else.

The server asked whether I’d like to come into the kitchen to say goodbye.

He led me through a curtain into a part of the restaurant I had never seen before.

I had never met the family who owns the restaurant and prepares the food. Yet they knew me immediately—not by my name, but by my Friday night order of spicy bamboo.

Through the server, who kindly interpreted our conversation, we talked about my move, about how long I’d been coming there, and about Hartford.

I thanked them for nearly two decades of wonderful meals.

The woman who cooks took both of my hands into hers and squeezed them. Before I left, she insisted I choose one of their logo shirts to take with me. Then she hugged me, walked me back through the dining room, and hugged me again at the door.

As I was leaving, I gave them my phone number and told them that if they were ever in Hartford, they would have a place to stay.

It struck me afterward that I had never really known them.

And yet, in another sense, we had known one another for years.

There is something quietly beautiful about relationships like that. They aren’t built through long conversations or dramatic moments. They are built through repetition. Through showing up. Through ordering the same meal on Friday evenings. Through exchanging smiles often enough that familiarity becomes its own language.

I’m not moving to the other side of the world. Hartford is only a few hours away. I’ll undoubtedly come back to Portland many times.

But the rhythms of my life are changing.

Friday nights won’t naturally end at Thai Tree anymore. Running into friends at familiar events won’t happen by accident. The rituals that quietly stitched together ordinary weeks are giving way to new ones that have yet to form.

The past two weeks have been a tour of lasts.

I’ve said goodbye to colleagues, neighbors, favorite walks, favorite views, favorite coffee shops, and favorite routines. I expected those moments to be difficult.

What I didn’t expect was that some of the deepest sadness would come from the seemingly simplest relationships—the ones that existed almost invisibly until I realized I was leaving them behind.

Perhaps that’s because places become home less through buildings than through people.

Sometimes they’re the people who have known you for twenty years.

Sometimes they’re the people with whom you’ve shared years of mutual appreciation without ever having been introduced.

That is the question I find myself considering this Independence Day.

Matt and I walked to the site of the old Marcal Paper Mill in Mechanic Falls. Once the town’s largest employer, the mill closed in 1981—the year I was born. In the decades that followed, the sprawling complex found a strange second life. Parts of it became warehouses, workshops, storage units, even apartments. Layers of history accumulated where paper machines once stood.

Then, in 2018, a massive fire consumed the property. Smoke billowed for miles. Old stored materials ignited, causing explosions throughout the blaze. A sleeping resident escaped only after bystanders broke into his apartment and woke him. More than one hundred firefighters responded from communities across the region.

The building was uninsured. Today, much of it remains exactly where the fire left it, its future uncertain.

I photographed the scene: a lone wheel rusting on cracked concrete, shattered glass catching the evening sun, piles of brick where walls once stood, moss carpeting what had been factory floors. Light poured through broken windows as if nothing had happened.

There are ghosts here—not in the supernatural sense, but in the traces of lives and labor. Generations worked within these walls. Then came mechanics, woodworkers, motorcycle collectors, tenants. Their stories survive only in fragments now, difficult to reconstruct without curiosity, memory, and care.

Nature has begun its own reclamation. Hawks nest atop the warped roof. A dobsonfly clings to a weathered doorframe. Grass pushes through concrete. Even in abandonment, life persists.

As America marks 250 years of independence, we too stand at a crossroads between relinquishment and renewal. I don’t know how our story will end. But standing in that ruined mill, watching the sunlight spill through broken windows, I was reminded that hope has a remarkable habit of finding its way through the cracks.

When we wandered onto Rue Saint-Anne that first evening—stumbled upon it, really, our soles navigating wide cobblestones—and saw the plates arriving on the patio at Savini, the five days ahead of us might as well have been infinity. At that moment, we still had all of them ahead.

“We have to come here for dinner one night,” you said aloud what we’d both already concluded, marveling at the pastas passing by.

Across the street, artisans were packing away their tents for the evening. There would be plenty of time, we thought, to browse their crafts tomorrow.

Québec City was a delightful surprise. I never would have chosen it as a vacation destination were it not the location of my yoga group’s annual gathering. Though in another country, it felt almost too close to qualify as “away.” I’d been there once before, too, though in what now feels like another lifetime and under circumstances that left little memory behind.

But the city won me over almost immediately. It is compact yet endlessly unfolding, its squares and narrow streets stacked upon the steep hillside overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. You follow a winding lane lined with stone buildings and steep slate roofs, certain you’ve reached the end, only to discover a staircase descending to another layer of the city. Then another after that.

The Plains of Abraham began just steps outside our hotel. That first evening they carried us to the Promenade des Gouverneurs, a raised wooden boardwalk winding through the treetops before opening onto Dufferin Terrace beneath the commanding silhouette of the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac. There, the city pulsed with life: children chasing pigeons beneath the gazebos, families posing for photographs, lines forming for ice cream, a stilt walker entertaining the crowd, a musician filling the evening air.

That route eventually delivered us onto Rue Saint-Anne, still an hour before sunset. And we hadn’t even discovered Lower Town yet.

On another day, those same Plains—once the site of decisive battles, now transformed into sprawling parkland dotted with public art, gardens, pétanque courts, and playgrounds—led us in the opposite direction to the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain. We set out on foot knowing only that, eventually, we would reach the great bridges spanning the river: the graceful suspension of the Pont Pierre-Laporte alongside the monumental cantilever of the Pont de Québec.

They seemed half a day’s walk away. And just as the summer heat began convincing us we’d made a mistake leaving our water bottles behind, we happened upon Station de la Plage.

There, beside a sandy beach, a public pool, and laughing children darting through splash pads, we found Fastoche! À la plage. We carried our trays upstairs to a table overlooking the water and indulged in poutine and ice-cold CELSIUS energy drinks. We lingered over every bite, saying little. There was nowhere else to be. Time, it seemed, belonged entirely to us.

By afternoon we reached Quai des Cageux at the western end of the promenade. We walked to the end of the pier and climbed the twenty-meter observation tower overlooking the Saint Lawrence River. This was the destination that had quietly been pulling us west all day.

From the top we stood together, taking it all in: the twin bridges suspended between riverbanks, the steady rhythm of the water below, the careful geometry of the promenade blending into the landscape. The sky opened during the final kilometer of our walk, and the tower’s roof sheltered us as rain began to fall.

We didn’t say much. Not because we’d exhausted our conversation, but because we’d long since abandoned the need to fill every silence. Some moments ask only to be witnessed.

Our days in the old French city were filled with moments like that. Standing atop centuries-old fortification walls. Ducking into cafés for croissants while summer showers passed overhead. Waking slowly in our hotel room and remembering, before our eyes were fully open, that today we were somewhere else—temporarily released from calendars, meetings, obligations, and routine.

On our final evening we returned to Rue Saint-Anne.

We had just finished a sightseeing cruise on the Saint Lawrence River, stepping ashore at Quai Chouinard in Québec City’s Old Port before wandering through the cobblestone streets and stairways connecting Lower Town to Upper Town.

We found Savini again and took a table outside amid the gentle hum of conversation, clinking glasses, passing footsteps, and the easy hospitality of the staff. Just a few days earlier, the walk there had felt like exploration—a city revealing itself one turn at a time. Now the route felt as familiar as the path to the treehouse behind my childhood home.

I ordered the penne alla vodka. You ordered the spaghetti alla bolognese. They tasted every bit as wonderful as they had looked that first evening.

But time itself had changed.

Five days earlier it had stretched before us like a path waiting to be walked. Now it was collapsing into a single evening. Every laugh, every shared observation, every lingering bite of pasta carried the quiet knowledge that by morning this place would belong only to memory. We can preserve photographs, recipes, maps—even entire cities—but never the passing of a moment itself.

And yet, if there is one thing you and I know, it is that life is long. It unfolds as a rolling sequence of moments like these. The places change. The streets change. The conversations change. But somewhere, again and again, we’ll find ourselves wandering toward another June evening, another table for two, another unfamiliar city that slowly becomes familiar just before it’s time to leave.

I remember moving back to Portland in late 2007 after having been priced out for a couple of years. My then-boyfriend and I rented a beautiful little open-concept one-bedroom on the third floor of an old brick building across from the State Theatre on Congress Street.

For the first time, I walked to work every day, heading down the hill to the bank on Exchange Street. Our friend group was made up of twenty- and thirty-somethings, young politicos and self-employed dreamers piecing together careers and causes. We’d gather in bars long since gone, talking strategy, campaigns, and initiatives.

I thought I had it made.

Life, work, and play all existed within an eight-tenths-of-a-mile radius of brick and cobblestone. On snowy evenings, voices echoed off the Time & Temp building. Winter lights draped from storefronts, lamp posts, and trees gave downtown a feeling of warmth and togetherness during the darkest months of the year.

I’ve remained on the peninsula all these years through different apartments, different employers, different relationships, and different chapters of life. I’ve continued commuting on foot through downtown streets. The city around me changed. So did I.

The old iconic members of Portland’s street community disappeared. Bobby. The man I once hoisted back to his feet after watching him fall. The man whose face lit up when I handed him a Tall Boy from the now-gone West End Deli beneath an awning on Park Street.

There are many others out there now. Communities unto themselves. But Bobby is not among them.

My own community changed, too. Friends dispersed—some geographically, others into careers, parenthood, and lives that no longer intersected as naturally as they once had.

I poured myself into public service. I gave as much as I could toward the idea that government should work for those who are too often forgotten. I did it for as long as I could.

But change-makers have a shelf life. They get caught in a centrifugal force and spit back out, battered like a lawn chair in a tornado. That’s just how it goes.

Meanwhile, professionally, I grew.

Somehow, over the course of those same years, I became one of those fully remote professionals working for a Fortune 500 company—the sort of worker Portlanders often blame for rising housing costs and changing neighborhood dynamics. Now, with the flexibility that work provides, I’m carrying that same trend to another New England city.

And while I love Portland, there are aspects of life here that have worn on me.

Politically, I’ve grown weary of the gap between the city’s self-image and its actions. Over the years I’ve watched residents invoke narratives of inclusion, equity, and community while opposing changes that might make Portland more accessible to people with fewer resources than themselves. It’s a tension that exists everywhere, but after years in public office, the illusion of the “progressive pocket” that drew me to Portland in my young adulthood has been thoroughly dispelled.

Then there are the less profound reasons.

The climate has worn on me, too.

My sister-in-law once explained her decision to leave Maine for Florida by saying, “Maine is just kind of the end of the road.”

It’s an apt assessment in many ways.

Don’t get me wrong. Maine has extraordinary natural beauty and a down-to-earth culture. It’s the place my parents chose to raise my brother and me because, as they put it, “kids need a big backyard.” In an era defined by climate instability, Maine still feels relatively safe.

Yet I cannot count the number of times I’ve been driving back across New England after a trip somewhere and crossed the Piscataqua River Bridge only to find the weather change instantly. In New Hampshire it’s overcast. In Maine it’s snowing. In New Hampshire it’s warm and humid. In Maine the temperature drops fifteen degrees and the ocean air takes over.

Then, just when winter seems ready to loosen its grip, the windy season arrives on the peninsula. For months, Atlantic winds barrel through downtown streets. I’ve spent nearly fifteen years running uphill into a headwind.

There are places—not far away, but just far enough southwest—where spring arrives a little earlier. Places where the winter sun lingers a little longer. Places sheltered from the strongest coastal winds. Places where the climate remains distinctly four-season, but just mild enough to make a meaningful quality-of-life difference.

So that’s where I’m going. To Hartford.

I’m not naïve enough to think a new place will solve every frustration. What happens here isn’t so different from what happens everywhere. Cities evolve. Communities change. People grow older.

But there is something valuable about finding a new launch pad midway through adulthood and the working years.

The moment feels right.

Another beautiful loft apartment downtown, but this one large enough to support autonomy within a new, interdependent relationship. A company that offers genuine opportunities for career growth. The start of a master’s program this fall. New streets to learn. New routines to build.

A seasonal farmers market at Old State House Square, two blocks away. Shops and restaurants spilling onto Pratt Street’s brick pedestrian corridor. Date nights at the Foundry, watching the city lights come on below us. The New York deli downstairs whose menu offers a veggie delight with avocado when I need something quick that hits the spot.

Maybe I’ve come full circle in a way.

At twenty-six, standing in that little apartment across from the State Theatre, I thought I had it made.

Now, eighteen years later, setting off for a new city, a new career chapter, a new degree, and a new partnership, I find myself feeling much the same way.

I can’t imagine what more there is to ask for.

As Frost once put it, “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

These days, it seems he got it right.

We loved it. We applied for it. Two days later, back home and back to work, we received notice that we had been approved.

And just like that, we are moving to Hartford.

Why Hartford?

For years, Hartford has existed in my life as a place passed through on the way somewhere else — a stopover city where I would wake early enough to run its riverfront trails or wander Bushnell Park before getting back on the road. It is also a place I have repeatedly heard described as “dangerous” or “dumpy,” though my own experiences never aligned with those characterizations.

Hartford is beautiful.

Its Riverwalk traces the Connecticut River beneath a skyline of glass towers and historic stone buildings. A cable-stayed pedestrian bridge rises at Mortensen Plaza like a piece of civic sculpture. Bushnell Park contains a Romanesque memorial arch that feels lifted from another century entirely. The Capitol building sits grandly against the skyline. Hartford possesses the architectural confidence of a historically prominent city.

Though only about 122,000 people live within the city limits, Hartford feels far larger because of its history as an insurance and healthcare hub. Downtown retains the bones of a true urban center: skyscrapers, broad avenues, dense civic infrastructure, and transit connectivity that makes Boston and New York feel surprisingly accessible. Yet unlike many Northeastern cities, it also ranks highly for park access and walkability.

Hartford suffers from a reputational hangover tied to its history.

In the mid-twentieth century, it was among the wealthiest cities in the United States. But postwar suburbanization — accelerated by federal housing policy, highway expansion, and the migration of wealth outward from urban centers — hollowed out much of the city’s tax base. In later decades, major corporations relocated large portions of their operations to suburban campuses, further draining residential and commercial activity from downtown.

Poverty concentrated. Disinvestment followed. Crime rose.

Today, Hartford’s crime rate remains high relative to Connecticut’s exceptionally low state average, though violent crime has declined significantly in recent years. Still, I have learned to be cautious about aggregate statistics detached from context.

When I served on the Portland school board, I often heard young parents explain that they planned to move to predominantly white suburban towns because Portland supposedly had “bad schools.” Yet when we disaggregated the data, Portland students from non-free-and-reduced-lunch households often outperformed comparable peers in those same suburbs. “Bad,” I came to realize, was frequently subconscious shorthand for “poor.”

Cities operate similarly.

Crime statistics, like school statistics, flatten complex realities into emotionally charged narratives. In Hartford, as in most American cities, violent crime is heavily concentrated in neighborhoods that have experienced generations of economic abandonment. “Dangerous” and “dumpy” often function less as objective descriptors than as coded reactions to visible poverty.

Ironically, that very stigma may be part of what has preserved Hartford’s relative affordability amid a national housing crisis.

The apartment we are moving into is comparable in quality and amenities to my current unit in Portland. But for the same price, it is more than a thousand square feet larger, includes an additional bedroom and bathroom, and sits directly in the center of downtown rather than in an adjacent neighborhood.

And perhaps more importantly, Hartford still feels like a place where urban living remains accessible relative to area wages.

I could imagine becoming civically involved there the way I once did in Portland — working toward policies that reinvest in communities long neglected by both capital and perception. The disparities between Connecticut’s wealthy suburbs and urban centers are stark, and impossible to ignore once seen clearly.

But first, I will settle into a new urban habitat that feels aligned with the scale of life I have been working toward.

I love living in cities. I hate the idea of car dependency. I need walkability, public space, and places to run. Matt and I need a home spacious enough to support both togetherness and independence without financial strain.

For us, Hartford feels like a place hiding in plain sight.

I’ve lost my handstand.

A year ago, I was practicing handstand nearly every day. I could catch consistent airtime with each kick-up and regularly hold the pose for fifteen to twenty seconds.

Then, last August, I had a bad fall. Although I escaped serious injury—no concussion, no fractures—I scraped my forehead on concrete. The physical wound healed quickly. The imprint it left on my nervous system did not.

I haven’t caught a successful float since.

This past winter, I went through a motivational slump when it came to fitness. A particularly cold and icy season didn’t help. Neither did the political climate. At the same time, my attention was being pulled toward other forms of growth: a job search, a developing passion for writing, and the countless demands of ordinary life. The work of overcoming fear and rebuilding confidence on my yoga mat became something I would get back to later.

Later kept moving.

Today, my handstand and Pincha practices feel as though they’ve returned to the beginning. It’s as if my fear lives in my push-off leg. My flying leg rises confidently toward the sky, but the moment my center of gravity begins to shift over my shoulders, something pulls me back down.

“Nope,” it says. “We’re not doing that. That’s not safe.”

Losing handstand has felt strangely destabilizing.

I joined Yogi Flight School in March 2021, when the program itself was only six months old. I remember those early years with enormous fondness. The exhilaration of discovering I was capable of things I had never imagined for myself. Arm balances. Inversions. Shapes that once seemed reserved for other people.

I remember the mechanical focus of practice: shift a little farther forward; point your toes; engage this muscle; soften that one. I remember discovering which mental cues unlocked physical results. I remember building muscle memory until movements that once felt impossible began to feel almost effortless.

Somewhere along the way, the practice became woven into my identity.

That is why losing handstand feels like more than losing a pose.

I find myself wondering who I am if I am no longer the person who can casually pop into a street handstand during a run.

Then I remember something our yoga teacher often says:

“We always get either the result we want or the lesson we need.”

Perhaps my lesson lies in the yogic principle of aparigraha: non-attachment.

We are not the sum total of the roles we play, the titles we hold, or the skills we possess. To bind our identity too tightly to any one of them is to lose sight of the larger whole. Handstand is not who I am. It is something I do—or, in this season, something I am relearning how to do.

It is only one small fraction of a much larger self.

So my commitment is simple.

I will show up at the Chateau Laurier in the old city of Quebec exactly as I am.

I will show up as someone whose handstand and Pincha now require fear work. As someone whose body is less conditioned than it was a year ago, but whose mechanics remain learned and waiting to be reawakened. As someone who still has headstand, arm balances, and a deep love for the practice itself.

I will show up as someone navigating major life transitions beyond the yoga mat.

And I will show up as someone who still has all of life ahead to continue the journey.

Sometimes the dissatisfaction comes from similarity. Both candidates are committed to the same economic assumptions. Both are insulated from experiences of poverty, discrimination, or precarity. Entire segments of the electorate look at the ballot and see no one who truly represents them.

For those who continue to participate anyway, voting becomes an exercise in evaluating degrees of harm. Less harmful on healthcare. Less harmful on labor rights. Less harmful on climate. Less harmful on civil liberties.

The latest controversy surrounding Graham Platner presents a different kind of calculation.

Here, the distinction is not primarily one of policy. On policy, the differences between Platner and Susan Collins are substantial and easy to identify. Instead, the distinction is between interpersonal harm and institutional harm. Personal failure versus systemic consequence.

Based on what is publicly known, the most objective description is that Platner exchanged sexually explicit messages with women outside his marriage. That is disappointing behavior. It represents a breach of trust. It caused pain to people who deserved better.

It is also, unfortunately, a very human kind of failure.

I’ve seen situations like this destroy relationships. I’ve also seen relationships survive them. Human beings are complicated. Relationships are built on thousands of interactions, accumulated over years, creating reserves of trust or resentment. Whether a relationship survives a betrayal often has less to do with the betrayal itself than with the totality of the relationship surrounding it.

None of that excuses the behavior. It simply acknowledges reality.

Perhaps what makes these situations so difficult is that we instinctively want character to be internally consistent. We want people who do harmful things to be wholly harmful people. We want betrayal to discredit talent, intelligence, compassion, and accomplishment alike. Yet human beings seldom conform to such tidy categories. A person’s failures may tell us something important about them, but they do not necessarily tell us everything.

The fact that someone has hurt a spouse does not erase their intelligence. It does not erase their policy positions. It does not erase their capacity to understand suffering, advocate for others, or govern effectively.

We are often tempted to divide people into heroes and villains because it simplifies the world. But there is no meaningful line separating good people from bad people. There are only people, each capable of kindness and cruelty, courage and cowardice, honesty and deception.

Every one of us contains both.

Perhaps that is why Platner’s support remains surprisingly resilient. Not because people approve of the behavior. Not because they think it doesn’t matter. But because they recognize something familiar in it: human imperfection.

The real question facing voters is not whether Graham Platner has flaws. He does.

The question is whether those flaws outweigh the consequences of the alternative.

In a healthier democracy, perhaps we would not be forced to make such calculations. We could demand both moral integrity and political alignment. We could insist on leaders who embody our values in every respect.

But that is not the democracy we inhabit.

The democracy we inhabit asks us, over and over again, to compare harms.

And so the debate is not really about text messages. It is about what kinds of failures we are willing to tolerate, what kinds of harms we believe are most consequential, and whether imperfect people can still represent us.

As usual in American politics, we are not choosing between good and evil.

We are choosing between different forms of human imperfection.

Though I had long felt fortunate in my role as a medical malpractice paralegal — doing highly analytical, intellectually engaging work with people I respected — I was also beginning to feel the constraints of having reached a professional ceiling. I wanted a new platform. A larger field of growth. The sense that the next twenty years of my professional life were still expanding rather than narrowing.

What followed was six months of persistence, rejection, recalibration, and ultimately, a challenge to the belief that effort yields outcome.

It is a principle I’d come to trust in life. When you put time and energy and discipline into something, eventually something comes back. Not always quickly. Not always proportionally. But predictably enough that I came to rely on the equation.

This job search strained that trust.

I found myself in a strange — yet I suspect common — professional middle ground. I was too experienced and specialized for many traditional paralegal roles, where firms could hire someone competent for significantly less money. But for adjacent industries in lateral positions, I might as well have been entry-level. My experience was respected, but not easily portable.

I seemed to land in the “B-pile”: technically qualified, interesting enough to keep around, but not the obvious, cookie-cutter candidate on paper. I would make it through screening interviews. Sometimes second rounds. I would begin constructing small visions of a future life around the possibility of the role. Then the rejection email would arrive, often several weeks later, after the company’s first-choice candidate had accepted.

The psychological experience of a sustained job search is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived through one recently. It is not simply disappointment. It is a repetitive cycle of hope generation and collapse. You learn to manage your own optimism. To temper imagination before it outruns reality. And yet, somehow, you must remain enthusiastic enough to continue performing belief in yourself to strangers.

There were moments I wondered whether meaningful professional growth was actually available to me at all.

But the thought of giving up never lasted very long. Maybe fifteen minutes before I was revising another cover letter or submitting another round of applications. Even now, after accepting my new position, rejection emails still arrive from applications I barely remember submitting.

And then, suddenly, everything changed all at once.

Within the span of a week, several opportunities appeared that aligned almost exactly with my background — roles adjacent to medical malpractice litigation and healthcare liability work. One in particular moved quickly and felt unusually aligned from the beginning. Instead of trying to translate or defend my experience, I found myself speaking with people who immediately understood its value.

For the first time in months, I was not trying to convince someone that my background could fit the role. The role itself had been built around the kind of experience I already had.

The position ultimately offered exactly what I had been searching for: substantive work, long-term growth potential, fully remote flexibility, and compensation that exceeded even my original hopes after months of recalibrating expectations downward.

After becoming accustomed to disappointment, the offer itself felt surreal. I found myself scrutinizing emails and web addresses for signs of hiring scams simply because good news had started to feel statistically improbable.

Leaving my former firm affected me.

When I gave notice, I was met not with resentment, but generosity. Congratulations. Support. Genuine happiness for me. One longtime supervising attorney wrote to tell me I was among the best people he had worked with — “smart, ethical, dedicated, and effective.” The kind of message you keep on file for a day you’re feeling down.

Workplaces often describe themselves as “family,” usually in ways that feel more aspirational than true. But this was the first professional environment where I genuinely felt that way. They supported me through difficult years of transition and independence in my personal life. They listened when I needed flexibility or growth. Leaving was bittersweet precisely because the experience there had been good.

But sometimes growth requires leaving even good situations behind.

So perhaps the lesson here is not that effort guarantees immediate reward. It does not. Effort can meet dead ends. It can collide with timing, economics, hiring trends, structural mismatch, randomness. It can exhaust and demoralize you.

And still, I believe effort yields outcome.

Not in a neat or linear way. Not on the timeline we demand from it. Sometimes the outcome arrives only after months of invisible persistence that nobody else sees.

My yoga teacher says, “we always get either the result we want or the lesson we need.” During this search, there were moments I wondered whether the lesson itself was going to be the only outcome available to me — resilience, humility, adaptation, patience. The repeated necessity of continuing despite disappointment.

And then, almost unexpectedly, the result arrived too.

Foundation will be built. Last year we laughed

And blabbered on and on over pizza.

That very first night — blissful, yet detached

From any notion of what we might dream

Together — what we’d whip in kitchen cups,

You wrestling the way there while I dove

Headlong. Then the parting seas opened up:

Our vision, crystal clear and unified.

Like navigating night by scattered stars,

Deliberate and uncertain, so our steps,

Firmly resolved, have brought us where we are.

One year: still brimming, though it passed so quick.

Tonight we toast to laying one last brick.

We were sheltering the men in a motor inn in Saco. A few days earlier, I had launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover the cost. We had met them only four days before that, when they appeared before the Portland City Council during a public hearing. They explained that they were cold, sleeping outside, unsure where their next meal would come from, and stunned to encounter homelessness for the first time in their lives upon arriving in the United States.

“I know it may be difficult to talk about,” I told them. “But the community supports you here. People care about what happens to you. When people hear your stories, they will donate. We can keep you housed and eventually help you find something permanent.”

Alongside the fundraiser, I had issued a press release explaining how a small group of us had scrambled together that first night to place the men in a hotel, and how we were now attempting to build a broader support network for their long-term housing and stability.

“Will you meet with her,” I asked, “and tell your stories?”

The men looked at one another, solemnly, and nodded.

When the article was published, I learned more about them than I had even known myself. Their stories followed a pattern common among many African asylum seekers. Life had once been ordinary. They had jobs, families, routines. Then one day the military arrived at their homes in retaliation for political dissent. They witnessed torture, rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and killing. Family members scattered in every direction. Eventually they fled to Brazil. From there, they walked roughly four thousand miles to the southern border of the United States and declared asylum.

When asked what they came looking for in America, their answer was unanimous:

“Safety.”

Stories are a form of currency. They are among the most powerful assets human beings possess. They move societies toward action — sometimes toward compassion, sometimes toward violence.

For these four men, stripped of nearly everything else, their stories became the means through which they survived. The public dissemination of those stories allowed us to shelter them temporarily and eventually move them into a home where each man had his own bedroom and a chance to begin rebuilding his life.

Human civilization itself is built upon stories.

In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that humanity’s defining evolutionary advantage emerged during the Cognitive Revolution: our ability to collectively believe in imagined realities. Money, borders, corporations, religions, laws, nations — none exist in nature in any objective sense. They exist because human beings collectively agree that they do.

A dollar bill possesses no intrinsic value. Its power comes entirely from shared belief.

This capacity evolved for a biological reason. Most highly social species can cooperate only within relatively small groups dependent upon direct interpersonal trust. Humans became different. We developed the ability to cooperate at enormous scales because we no longer needed to personally know one another. We needed only to believe that we shared the same systems, rules, and narratives.

I thought about this recently while meeting my Instacart shopper outside my apartment building. She arrived with my groceries; I met her with my folding city cart; together we transferred the bags like two coworkers who had rehearsed the process a hundred times before. We were complete strangers, yet we moved in near-perfect coordination because both of us understood the system. We trusted the structure surrounding the interaction. We had, in effect, both bought into the Instacart narrative.

Narratives are therefore not incidental to human society. They are foundational to it. They shape how we organize ourselves, how we distribute resources, how we interpret morality, and how we decide who belongs.

But narratives are double-edged.

Currency enables trade and economic development; it also enables staggering inequality. A billionaire’s wealth exists largely as abstraction — numbers recognized within a collectively accepted system. The widening gulf between those who have and those who do not persists partly because we continue to participate in, and legitimize, the narrative structures that sustain it.

Borders function similarly. Humans divide themselves using invisible lines on maps and collectively agree those lines carry moral and political significance. Borders help organize governance and resources. But they also enable “othering” — the belief that human worth changes depending upon which side of an imaginary line someone was born.

Authoritarian movements have long understood the power of narrative. One of the earliest hallmarks of authoritarianism is control over media and information because control over narrative is ultimately control over public perception itself.

In The Story Paradox, Jonathan Gottschall argues that Donald Trump’s political strength has never primarily rested in policy expertise or institutional knowledge, but in storytelling. MAGA operates as a narrative framework: the promise of a fallen nation restored to greatness through the intervention of a singular heroic figure battling corrupt internal enemies.

Stories like these are powerful because they provide emotional coherence. They simplify complexity. They transform anxiety into certainty.

Narrative becomes most dangerous when it detaches itself from reality while retaining legitimacy.

After the 2024 election, I found myself increasingly unable to tolerate mainstream political coverage for precisely this reason. Much of contemporary media remains deeply committed to presenting “both sides” of an issue, but far less committed to determining whether both sides are factually grounded. When truth and falsehood are framed as equally credible competing perspectives, the public loses its ability to make coherent moral judgments.

Consider the administration’s repeated justification for expanded ICE detention operations under the rhetoric of targeting the “worst of the worst.” The narrative suggested violent criminals were flooding American communities unchecked. Yet available data consistently showed that only a small fraction of detainees had violent criminal histories, while many were legally authorized to remain in the United States. Nevertheless, the story itself — emotionally potent and endlessly repeated — became more influential than the underlying facts.

This is the danger of legitimized falsehood. Not merely lying, but institutionalizing narrative untethered from reality.

And yet the solution cannot be to eliminate narrative altogether. Human beings cannot function without stories. Narrative is how we construct meaning, sustain cooperation, and organize civilization itself. The same force that fuels propaganda also fuels empathy. It is why four displaced men from Angola and Congo could arrive in Maine with nothing but their testimonies and find strangers willing to help them survive.

The question, then, is not whether humanity can live without narrative. It is whether we can build cultures and institutions capable of continually forcing narrative back into contact with reality.

A healthy society requires friction between story and fact. It requires journalism committed not merely to neutrality, but to verification. Education systems that teach media literacy and historical reasoning. Political cultures that reward intellectual humility rather than emotional certainty. Citizens willing to tolerate complexity instead of retreating into mythologies that flatter their fears or identities.

Because stories will always govern humanity.

The only question is whether they will remain accountable to truth.

Without that accountability, narrative becomes something else entirely: not the glue that binds civilization together, but the mechanism through which it quietly dismantles itself.

Mills did some commendable things as governor that are well worth chronicling in her legacy. She followed eight years of the Paul LePage administration—a figure who once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”² and whose tenure frequently made national headlines for inflammatory rhetoric and a combative governing style.

One of Mills’ first acts was to accept federal Medicaid expansion funds that LePage had rejected, ultimately extending health coverage to more than 100,000 low-income Mainers.³ It was a long-delayed policy shift with immediate and tangible impact.

In her first year, she also fulfilled the state’s long-standing education funding obligation by bringing funding for Essential Programs and Services (EPS) to 55 percent—a mandate in place since 2004 that had rarely, if ever, been fully honored.⁴ During that period, I was serving as chair of the finance committee and later chair of the board of public education, and I can personally attest to the impact. As a city with rapidly increasing property values, we were each year working to fill growing multimillion-dollar gaps that inevitably led to program cuts. For the first time in years, there was no gap. We were able to reinvest—directly—into long-articulated goals like behavioral health supports for students with the greatest needs.

Mills’ early tenure felt like a reset—a lifting of the punitive tone that had defined the prior administration, and a return to functional governance.

Yet, fast-forward to today, in the era of a second Trump presidency, when authoritarian tendencies have become normalized on the national stage, it is no longer clear that restoring baseline governance is sufficient. Efforts to finally meet long-unfulfilled mandates and stabilize systems may have been necessary, but they are not transformative. It is the strategy establishment Democrats have relied on for decades, and it has not meaningfully altered the broader trajectory.

Mills did not re-establish permit requirements for concealed carry—one of the most significant gun-control measures rolled back under LePage.⁵ She continued to defend Maine’s existing “yellow flag” law, widely viewed as weaker than red-flag systems, even after the state’s first mass shooting.⁶ Maine remains, by comparison to most blue states, relatively permissive in its gun laws.

She also avoided raising income tax rates during her tenure.⁷ While she later expressed openness to a so-called “millionaire’s tax,” no such measure was enacted into law.⁸

Meanwhile, municipalities like Portland again faced growing financial strain. The Mills administration, through the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, enforced and formalized General Assistance reimbursement rules that effectively shifted more of the financial responsibility for sheltering unhoused residents onto municipalities. Portland officials warned that the gap between state reimbursement and actual shelter costs could reduce capacity and strain the system.⁹ In my year chairing the city council’s finance committee, we faced a roughly $4 million shortfall tied in part to these dynamics. The city’s appeals for additional state support—even one-time funding—were ultimately rejected.

Taken together, Mills corrected many of the overt excesses of the administration that preceded her, but she rarely pursued deeper structural investments in the populations most in need if doing so risked alienating a moderate and economically influential base. The contrast between her and LePage is clear. The contrast between her and a Republican opponent in a Senate race, however, becomes far more vulnerable to narrative framing—and in modern elections, narrative often eclipses policy.

The lack of momentum behind her candidacy may therefore reflect something broader than campaign mechanics. It may suggest that left-leaning voters are increasingly seeking a more assertive, structural response to the conditions of our time. Perhaps we are beginning to recognize, collectively, that liberal moderation has not provided a sufficient counterweight to the forces of concentrated capital and creeping authoritarianism. At best, it has slowed those forces. At worst, it has accommodated them.

And perhaps now, voters are not only willing to reject right-wing conservatism, but to replace it with leaders willing to pursue more fundamental change—because that is what this moment appears to demand.

1. Reporting on Janet Mills ending Senate bid citing fundraising constraints (April 30, 2026)

2. Quote from Paul LePage: “I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular”

3. MaineCare expansion enrollment data (Maine DHHS)

4. EPS 55% funding mandate (2004 referendum; Maine DOE budget data)

5. Maine permitless carry law (2015)

6. Maine “yellow flag” law (2019) and post-Lewiston policy debates

7. Maine state budgets under Mills (no general income tax rate increases)

8. Mills statements on potential high-income tax proposals (2024–2026)

9. Maine DHHS GA reimbursement rule enforcement; Portland funding gap reporting

I let my eyes move slowly across the room: high ceilings, artwork against white walls, throw pillows arranged to welcome, blankets splashing color and softness across the sofa. The thick white shag rug where more than one guest has chosen over the furniture to sprawl like a kid ready for Saturday morning cartoons.

My plants are thriving.

The aloe—last survivor from the original batch I bought when I moved in two years ago—began as five small leaves in an oversized pot. Now it spills over one edge like a green waterfall, trunk bent with confidence, four pups pushing up through the soil beside it.

The dracaena cane stands taller by the week, full and glossy, deep green leaves striped in yellow. It replaced my first yucca.

When I moved in—the first place ever fully my own—I knew almost nothing about caring for plants. I overwatered the poor yucca beyond saving.

But I learned.

And the health of my houseplants is now a quiet source of pride.

They are a reflection of the environment I built—one that supports life and freedom of growth.

I gaze over to the money tree, the newest addition.

I saw it at Whole Foods while shopping with Matt the weekend before we left for Spain. Ever the yin to my yang, he gently argued against the impulse purchase. Better to wait until we got back, he said, so I’d be home during its first week in a new habitat.

He abandoned that position quickly in the face of my furrowed look of dismissal.

The next morning, he was helping me load the money tree into his car so I wouldn’t have to carry it two cobblestoned tenths of a mile through the raw March air on the peninsula.

I had recently opened a space for it near the window in my home office after replacing the glass-top desk that had followed me through fifteen years and two exes. In its place: a chic wooden desk against the side wall, better aligned with the feng shui.

I placed the tree in the light and left for Spain.

When we returned, a few lower leaves had browned and fallen. But above them, bright new leaves had already unfurled, and tiny beads of translucent sap shimmered in the sunlight.

The tree was happy.

Adjusting.

In the morning, I’ll linger again, as I have every workday since moving in—giving myself five extra minutes before rushing out the door just to stand in my own space. A kind of meditation.

My place is an extension of me: stylish but calm, tasteful, complete, elegant, secure.

This apartment was the best thing for me when I needed it.

And as I flip off the light and let the room disappear into night, I realize something else:

In only two years, it may have already done its job.

I still marvel at it. I still feel gratitude standing here.

But beneath the gratitude, something is stirring: the old familiar momentum of becoming again, returning now to set the stage for transformation.

And present day seems but a vacated
Vessel; empty “good mornings,” afternoons
In daydream biding time — wishing, waiting —
Idle seconds, measured in coffee spoons.
Not that it’s an unhappy place, the here
And now; it calms and glows as a furnace
Fire, warms as a tightly-wrapped blanket,
Though threadbare, having outlived its purpose.
As a braided money tree stands potted,
Thriving, adorning a corner window,
But confined, stretching high to the ceiling,
You remain in stasis, yearning to grow;
Pensive and hopeful, just one break away—
Yet a ghost, caught reliving yesterday.

And every indication up to now
Suggests it is a universal rule:
That labor yields reward as farming bears
Harvest, a planted seed grows into fruit.
Not that dreams run wild, untamed, limitless.
The pathway inevitably reshapes
In response to circumstance, as river
Rapids crashing upon sudden rock take
A scattered form, and yet reach the ocean.
Nor have your ambitions sprung out of bounds,
But remained measured, aptly constructed.
The roots you tend take firm hold underground.
All signs point toward eventual relief
And every cause to hold fast to belief.

Our footprints trail us only momentarily before they are swept up and replaced with naturally forming ripples.

Back home, in the small city at the opposite shore of this ocean, over three thousand miles away, there is a patch of sidewalk I pass each day where the brick has come up, leaving a rectangular hole. Each spring, the city workers patch it with asphalt. Each winter, the ground frost undoes their work, pressing the asphalt from underneath until it cracks, then melting and leaving behind crumbled sediment once again.

Passing it might spark a memory from another time I passed it. Maybe it was ten years ago, and I was walking to work at the courthouse — amid the granite and marble halls of justice. I had long hair then and wore it in a bun to avoid the inevitable tangling brought on by Atlantic winds racing through the peninsula corridors, especially in March and April.

Or maybe it was fifteen years ago, and I was on my way to the Empire, the bar where my friend group congregated and schemed over local ales about how we, young progressive politicos, might infiltrate local government and influence policy.

Hundreds of memories live in the space where my stride brushes past the missing brick. The ground there does not change shape the way the dunes in Maspalomas do, though I have lived many lives treading upon it.

“I feel so much at peace here,” Matt observes as we trudge over the soft ground. “Something about being so far removed from it all — I don’t know.”

He and I crossed paths serendipitously, each leaving something behind. As the wind erases our paths on the dunes of Maspalomas, it feels as though it clears a slate for us, offering a starting point.

In another two days, we will travel home — back to the familiar sidewalks. Yet something of this place comes with us. A quality carried in the trade winds — amor fati — not erasure, but authorship. Something intentional, and ours.

The Catedral de Santa Ana began construction in 1497, nearly twenty years following the Crown of Castile’s conquest of Gran Canaria. It was built deliberately in Vegueta, the newly established administrative and religious center of Spanish rule on the island.

From its inception, the cathedral was not just a religious structure but a purposeful instrument and symbol of colonialism. It marked the imposition of Christianity over the Indigenous Guanche population, and established the authority of the Spanish Crown and Church simultaneously.

It still serves as a functioning place of worship, but outside of its daily mass hours, it operates more like a museum—allowing, for a small entrance fee, the public to come and wonder at its ornate features, expansive ceilings, and dense ornamentation.

Depositing our euros with the clerk at the front desk, we crossed the foyer threshold and arrived immediately in the nave—the central cathedral body—behind the back row of pews that tiered their way toward the apse and altar, a seeming mile away.

Branching, weblike Gothic vaults ribbed the interior—columns stretching heavenward from their foundations in the floor like trees, culminating in a canopy of arches overhead. Warm light streamed in through colored glass in fragments, a kind of controlled, selective illumination.

The ornamentation intensified as we approached the altar; a progression from stone to gilded density. If the exterior was commanding yet restrained, the interior unfolded into decadence—gold, sculpture, paintings, retablo elements decorating the apse, a carved wooden pulpit staircase winding its way to center stage, where voice becomes power.

To be inside the cathedral is to be surrounded by lavish ornament, immersed in sensory excess. We moved slowly this unhurried afternoon, eyes wide, absorbing each facet of detail, until we reached the opposite corner where a vestibule held a small elevator up to the bell tower.

It wasn’t a high climb, but the stairs were closed for renovations that day, so we waited our turn for the six-person elevator. Upon arrival at the top, we stepped out onto the roof terrace—a walkway connecting the towers, lined on each side with a stone balustrade.

Gazing over one side, a sea of dense buildings below led the eye to the ocean in the distance—a watchtower view. Turning, the cathedral’s dark volcanic cupola rose out of a flat white roof, capped with a cross against the Atlantic horizon.

The bell appeared on one end, framed by a grand arch until we stepped fully into the open air and the arch disappeared behind us. It stood heavy and cylindrical, almost fortress-like in its perched setting, just out of reach.

Standing there, moving through each vantage point in a full-circle view, it seemed that every perspective had been intentionally composed—symmetry, arches and columns, ocean and city landscapes held in balance. I turned toward the plaza and looked out from its centerline. A perfect rectangle from where we had just come, palm trees spaced evenly, the Casas Consistoriales anchoring the opposite end—“municipal houses,” the seat of government facing the seat of religion.

Tightly enclosing the square were buildings upon buildings upon buildings—like rolling hills of rooftops stretching toward the mountains, meeting a vast, overcast sky. A whole society unfolding outward from a single point.

From this height, the order of it all came into view—the geometry of the plaza, the alignment of church and state, the city gathered and held in place.

And beyond it, the ocean—open, uncontained—the same direction in which this language of stone had once moved outward.

What felt, from below, like a single place revealed itself instead as a point of origin.