30 Till 30 | Choosing Family and Living in a Sitcom
If Friends and Cheers had a baby…
Ask my therapist and she’ll tell you: I’ve equated my life in DC to a sitcom, but in one specific way—everyone I know is in walking distance. Chalk it up to the fact that DC is relatively small with a strong population density, but what are the chances that the people I’d actually get along with lived so close? When I lived in California, my closest friend lived in La Puente and I was in Koreatown while my parents lived in Santa Clarita and my brother in Toluca Lake. On any given day, we were all between thirty minutes and two hours away from each other BY CAR.
And that was really the first indicator that I would fit in living here—I was already a sitcom obsessed kid and now I could live as a sitcom obsessed adult. Like, it’s truly comical how many people I will run into going on a run or while at the grocery store or across the way in Navy Yard (not that anyone has any reason to be in Navy Yard).
The second indicator didn’t come until very recently at Joey and Jason’s Christmas party. Now these are always a spectacle, an event, THE EVENT…of the moderately-sized area between North Cap and 7th NW and Florida and New York! Everyone who’s anyone would be there, and that filled me with dread. DREAD. Too many people in one space and there’s just me. Who might know five people at best.
But then…
I walk through the door and immediately see someone I knew. Then another and another. I went up to put my coat away and ran into two more. I never realized my circle had gotten so full. I never realized that I could call it my circle. It always felt like I was on the periphery; like that bubble that is just attached to the outside of a bigger bubble—close but not quite a part of it. And so to have that idea just pop away (see what I did there?) upon walking through the door filled me with elation.
I chose to move across the country and I chose to surround myself with these people and it all made sense. It all felt right. It feels right. And so now, I’m finding myself embarking on this new multi-season sitcom with a cast of characters I wouldn’t dare recast or kill off (yet). Will hijinks ensue? Will love burn slowly? Will Joey get stuck between doors again?! I’ll have to find out and let you know when I inevitably bamboozle myself into doing a 40 Till 40 blog in ten years.
Anyways, my point is that I made a blind faith decision moving to DC—I jumped without knowing where I was going to land and expected the worst, but got the unimaginably best outcome. I get to wake up everyday with the realization that, yeah, I actually made the right choice coming here.
And I’d do it again.
