The Promise of Suburbia

I’m embarrassed to tell you all of this, but I can’t help it. I’ve just slept in my childhood bedroom.

Welcome to my inaugural post! It’s nostalgia week over here. I’m usually there, anyway, wherever sentimentality takes us. I’m delving into the places I used to be and the people I used to know and the things I used to do. 

And speaking of where we come from — some of you may know I’m Palestinian. I’m technically a second-generation refugee, according to the U.N., but I digress. If you’ve ever enjoyed my writing (or if you hate it, at least I’ve made you feel something, right?), please consider donating to Healing Our Homeland, a grassroots organization doing incredible work feeding and caring for communities in Gaza. I’ve personally met the founder and am in awe of her commitment to the Palestinian people, especially right now in Gaza.

This week, I didn’t think I was going to write something like this and then I did! Yikes! I guess the personal essay bubble has yet to pop for me. I know this looks like a long post, but I promise, she’ll go quickly. And to my very first subscribers: I CHERISH you. I can’t tell you how honored I am to have you here and how very bashful I feel to impose my writing upon you… but… this is what you signed up for honey! Anyway… 

---

The Gist:

Time is molasses on the tree-lined streets of Prairie Village. There is assuredly nowhere more pressing to be than in the exact spot you are. People stand in line at the pharmacy, the coffee shop, the grocery store without urgency, sometimes excruciatingly so. The roads wind, wide and gracious, around newly-built homes exploding from the constraints of their lots, with manicured lawns outstretched at their faces. The neighboring town keeps their golf-courses trimmed and green, and to this day the deeds to many of the surrounding houses, historic and obsolete as they may be, explicitly prohibit my kind (“Arabians”) from ownership. But, the bakery down the street just has the best chocolate chip cookies (everyone swears so) and, when I was a child, the moms nearly always asked nicely before they pet my curls. Here, the birds sing unceremoniously, nearly vacuously, throughout the day to apathetic ears who’ve never known the emptiness of their absence, uninhibited by the onslaught of sound that sometimes stifles them into silence where I live in New York City.

There was a time when all I could do was run from the soil where I grew — the suburbs that coddled me throughout childhood — and headfirst into a spot in line as a pick-me transplant (“I’m not like the other transplants!!! Promise!!!”). It’s easy to feign disdain for the town you came of age in — to jeer when you return for a weekend when you’re still 22 and grasping at some semblance of identity, maybe even exceptionalism, and snidely note how nearly nothing has changed (was it supposed to in the six months since you left?). To feel the judgment well up toward those who will never leave eventually melt and reveal perhaps its true shape: jealousy.

You must convince yourself it’s all grotesque. At least, I have to. That it’s not intoxicating to sit behind the steering wheel of a car, one with the windows down and sticky summer air filtering in and rifling through my hair. That the silence that befalls the town at night feels isolating instead of peaceful. That my weekends, filled with the never-ending absence of the people I left behind, are never lonely. Who could ever be alone in a city like this? And mostly, that my parents have aged at the same rate as my hometown friends’ parents have: not in gargantuan leaps but in slow, untroubling ascension. 

Sometimes, I find myself running errands that don’t exist, driving down streets aimlessly, in the opposite direction of where I need to be. I think I’m searching for something — maybe a place where I still exist. I go to Sonic and get nothing more than a cup of ice. I pass slowly by my old high school, and pause at the crest of the hill. I used to love the sky from here. I stare at the big dipper perched in the dark while opening our creaky front door. My father makes me dinner in the home I grew up in, and I gorge myself on the familiarity of it all. It’s been years and years since I left, but the house clings to the smell of rice as I lie in the same bed I did when I was five. I fall asleep thinking of New York. 

When I drive through the fields just south, where the hills swell into one another and pods of cows graze just feet from the highway and, at noon, the clouds leave imprinted shadows on the grass below, I become irate. Is this what I’m running from? What if I could just want this? What if my brother had never moved to a coast other than my own and how dare he get older in my absence? Would it be so bad if I relinquished my brain to something a little more still? What is it that I’m even looking for? Out east? Out here? It’s mortifying to be crying on cruise control. 

There’s a promise in suburbia, false of an idol as it may be. At least, one I’ve sold myself. Predictability is, for better or worse, enshrined in some unspoken code of ethics. The lights in the parking lot of the hair salon across the street turn on and off at the same time every day, and the first snowfall of the year nearly always lands on my birthday. Life, I’m convinced, is filled with a sense of ease here. The places you need to go never seem far and grief feels as though it happens elsewhere, even when it’s taking root in your own home. The price of sheer existence, exorbitant still, feels less boisterous than what New York City has to offer me. That better life? The one that seems to be slipping precariously away and out from under our feet, doesn’t it seem within reach here, in the place you were once young? A home of your own. A picket fence. A car or bus to take you where it is you need to go, quickly and quietly. A lawn, maybe even with room to run. Trees that rustle in the summer and turn brown in the fall, and cardinals that sing from their branches in the backyard. 

Does the unending possibility and mystical unknown that coats our childhoods stay behind, trapped in the place we once felt it? Perhaps it’s the nostalgia that leaks from every pore in Prairie Village that haunts me whenever I return, or maybe it’s the fear that I’ll never have what it is my father bare-knuckled to build. In the suburbs, the promise of America is seemingly frozen in time — the hollow guarantees my parents were sold are still alive somewhere, ready for the taking, if only someone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps just hard enough.

---

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts and media rattling around in my mind:

• Something I didn’t consider when launching this newsletter is that, now, I have to actually write it and, worse, have people read it. 

• Does anyone ever ask for a honking, plain old glass of milk on flights? Do they even provide milk on planes to eat with those incredible, Delta Biscoff cookies? (Domestically, it seems not!) 

• Love this guy who runs around malls dressed (and getting decked) as a tiny wizard. It’s only a matter of time until he's running in a pair of Kiki boots and doing a social collab with Marc Jacobs. 

@crawly_possessedPoor knights 😡 Next time I’ll bring my squad ⚔️

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

• The last time I visited my family in Syria, my very cool, older cousin had every season of Desperate Housewives on DVD at her house. I stayed up the entire night and watched almost the entirety of the series. I was 14. Recently, I stumbled upon this clip of Bree Van de Kamp choosing “Palestine” as her safe word after her husband tells her to “pick something serious.” Perhaps it’s time for a rewatch with my fully-developed frontal cortex after all. 

• Lost my shit when I saw this lady rip out a stunning spiral staircase in an old home she bought and replace it with, essentially, a ladder. She said she and her husband are gutting the home (which is filled with treasures like FLANNEL, fabric wallpaper) and building a “modern farmhouse.” Girl, just buy a modern farmhouse… we are INUNDATED with modern farmhouses!!! And yes, she was a MAGA girlypop. 

  

  before + after

  ---

Water Cooler Chat: 

Conversations with people in my orbit: 

Oh my god, look who I just bumped into. It’s Megan O’Sullivan, the writer (you can find her work in T Mag, the New York Times, i-D, Vogue, GQ), editor, thinker, wonderful friend, and co-founder of the beloved publication Byline. Meg, when are you most nostalgic?

Meg:

Today, I was walking with Lauren [Daccache], and she was like, “this is actually the most you I've seen you in a while,” especially my outfit. And I think there's a lot of nostalgia we can feel through clothes, and I don't think we have to talk about fashion, but it feels really fitting for today, because I was like, I think I am kind of just coming back to me over here. 

Danya:

I feel like a lot of people in my life are kind of feeling that way.

Meg:

I hate to bring up Covid, but I do think that there were some years afterwards where people kind of tested limits or tried out new things, and that's all really good. And then it's also good to kind of be like, actually, these are the parts of my life, or my world or my lifestyle that I'm going to keep that were actually good, that I actually want to bring back.

Danya:

Wait, so what did that look like? Why did Lauren pick up on that?

Meg:

Right when I moved to New York, I wrote my first essay for the Drunken Canal that was kind of really discarding PrairieCore and being like,” Why were we dressing in this, like, sweet, incredibly unsexy way?” But from 2016 to 2019, I really leaned into that style. I was really in PrairieCore land for four years, and then any part of it would just give me a terrible taste in my mouth after 2020. I think it was because I was discarding parts of myself that were very rule-following, and I guess more covered up.  I felt like PrairieCore represented being really covered up, pared down, distilled and safe. And I was like “to hell with that.” Lorde wore that Christopher Esber two-piece in her Solar Power music video at the time. Everyone was wearing crop tops. Everyone was kind of trying something a little edgier, a little more fun and daring, and then last week, I bought a plaid skirt. I'm leaning back into what we're seeing with Dôen and Gap, the soft whites. And it's all fairly essential summery. But for me, it's more than that. It's like, maybe there's a part of that softness that I want to keep. Maybe it's not all bad. I felt kind of nostalgic for the parts of me that were really pure in my 20s and liked PrairieCore just because it was cute and it didn't necessarily really mean anything. And maybe there's something about that that's not all that bad, right? 

It's like what you were talking about with your hometown. It’s good to leave it for a while and let yourself disdain it a little bit. You have to do that in order to love it again. I think that's true with everything that relates to parts of ourselves and nostalgia.

Danya:

When you get nostalgic, do you get the warm fuzzies? Or are you somebody that feels suffocated by nostalgia?

Meg:  

Both? I think it depends on what we're being nostalgic about. Some types of nostalgia make me feel a little depressive, like, man, everything was so good back then, man, I was so pure back then. There are parts of my hometown that make me a little sad, because I don't think I could ever go back to that brain that was just happy being in Texas. I just wonder if there are parts of me that I can even ever access again. But then there are parts that are warm, fuzzy memories of being a little girl, remembering getting excited by jelly shoes or a Spice Girl CD, or a slumber party. 

Danya:

I think there's a fine line, almost age-wise, where the nostalgia teeters from warm, fuzzy into discomfort. Right when you turn 18. You're an adult then, and yet you're still kind of in the mindset of, if you're lucky enough and privileged enough, to still be a kid. 

Meg:

Do you remember in that movie, This Is 40, when Paul Rudd is watching his daughter get so excited about something, and he was like, “Well, I wish I could get that excited about anything.” I remember seeing that movie for the first time being like that must suck. And I don't feel that way, but I understand what he meant. I think part of nostalgia for me now is just kind of smiling at how things felt like a bigger deal when I was younger.

Danya:

The sickest part of it all is that, like 20 years from now, we're going to be so nostalgic for this time in our life, and we don't even fucking know it. We have no fucking idea. 

Meg:

I love the idea, though, that we could look back and be like, “Oh, I still didn't even know ABCDEFG.” Like I didn't even know about it! I think that's really exciting. And I think it's also really exciting to be in your late 20s or 30s, where at least you can know that you don't know things. It’s just less humiliating. Versus, in my early 20s, I just didn't even know that I didn't know things.

Danya:

I thought I knew so much. I was like, “my brain is swollen with information.” I was actually like a newborn who had never learned, like, volume displacement.

Meg:

That’s why, that upbringing that you wrote about in suburbia, I can really relate to. That's why you were happy in it as a child, because that was a different time of not knowing things, where it was like, I could have just stayed there forever if no one ever pulled back the blinds and showed me something else. The lobotomy of it all.

Danya:

For my parents, part of that was probably, subconsciously, by design, to make sure that my brother and I could grow up not having to “know things,” like hardship in specific kinds of ways. 

Meg:

Because they know things.

Danya:

And then my brother and I sought it out anyway ourselves. Perhaps it’s a betrayal to what my parents tried to offer us.

If you could go back in time and freeze yourself at one point in your life and just stay there, what time would that be in your life?

Meg:

My gut reaction to that was no, because I really do feel lucky that now is a really a good time in my life. But I do think that looking back at 17 years old, talk about an excitable time. I mean, like driving and going on dates for the first time, and looking like a woman for the first time. I think that I would go on vacation with her, or go on vacation as her and revel in that, this “everything is new: feeling. You're still a kid, but it's like those first drops of tasting anything womanhood-related. I think that's really beautiful. 

Danya:

I love thinking about the first time I was like oh my god, I'm a woman.

Meg:

Oh my god, I can tell you the moment. I was in Mexico with my family. I remember going to the bathroom and looking in the mirror and being like, whoa. I am no longer a child. And it was the first time I felt really good about being a woman. 

Danya:  

I remember buying my first training bra with my mom at Limited Too, and I was so fucking embarrassed, even though everyone else was in there buying training bras with their moms. 

Meg:

That was really special at that age and excruciating at the same time, because ~ beauty standards ~ but those just rare glimpses of feeling like, maybe you're going to be okay, within all of the swirling of what we're supposed to look like, those rare first glimpses of maybe I can deal with this. 

I'm so glad to not have grown up with what I see online. That is not something I would want to bring on the vacation with my 18-year-old self. I wouldn't want her to see any of that 

Danya:

I'm not God's strongest soldier, like I would not be well.

Meg:

My biggest hope for girls is that we kind of grab it all by the reins and see how unrealistic everything that we're seeing online is, and start to embrace what is more realistic. That's super optimistic, but…

Danya:

I love seeing celebrities having natural teeth. 

Meg:

I didn’t know veneers were such a big thing? 

Danya:

Yeah girl, everybody has veneers.

Meg:

You know, most of my friends are in their 30s, and doing little things here and there, like little injections, little Botox, little this, little that, myself included, and I just wonder, is this life now forever? Maybe so.

But that's the stuff when I think back to my younger self living in suburbia, she had no idea about any of that. Bless her. Bless her little heart.