Growing Up

Childhood

My happiest childhood memories were all made in the first six years. After that, I was moved to the suburbs of my city, and soon enough I got shy, and it got harder and harder to make friends. I lived in the same suburb, going to the same conservative school, until I graduated. Then COVID hit. To me, a lot of my future life’s work is aimed at erasing that possibility of a pretty lame, isolated childhood for someone else. I was an outsider, yes, but it was more than that. And the fact that we keep rebuilding this problem pisses me off.

The City

My city was a typical, small midwest American city, more or less. In my opinion it had a lot more culture than average, but the consensus from people who travel is that it’s pretty much just like all the rest. So maybe some of this will resonate with you.

There were a good few streets, but most of the city was dangerous, or at least named as such. The danger was all any adult in my family ever talked about. These adults all tended to live in the suburbs, as white people do. I’m white, so we’re clear. I was also one of, like, two white kids in my little public-school kindergarten class.

Yes, it was dangerous, gun violence sometimes and all. America being America. I know some days I couldn’t go to school (we walked) because of a shooting. Our car and house was broken into every so often. Tenants downstairs or up would bring hard drugs in and be pretty open about it, pretty frequently. I had to keep switching babysitters while my mom was single because of various… hardships on their ends. Not like it was just when toddler-to-kindergarten me was absent either! My dad left in the midst and aftermath of a heroin/acid obsession, supplied by the city’s people of course, and one of my many babysitters (a neighbor) sold cocaine.

So nobody liked it when I brought up the following: How, after those few years downtown, nothing in the shitty, isolated suburbs could make me feel so alive.

And I never really forgave my caregivers for moving me away, regardless of the selfishness of that. I was moved for safety and a better education, and I appreciate the education, but listen, I’m crazy, I think that regardless of the level of safety of anywhere, I would have been just fine.

The Suburbs… Behind The Suburbs

I lived in the suburbs that stretch out after the first ring of suburbs encircling a city center. The destination of the second generation of white flight. A conservative wasteland of any culture and life. In my opinion, of course. Everyone out here owns a little piece of paradise! I have had so, so many nightmares of running on-foot through this thing considered “paradise”. When I say “suburban hellscape”, girl, I mean it. Nightmare territory.

Endless rows of soulless houses. If someone wants something in life, here, they buy it, they can’t find happiness any other way. This was where some of the richest people lived, with all that space for new development. I lived in the poorest (to me, the most alive) part of this rich public school district, which was the whole selling point for my caregivers buying the place. But don’t get me wrong, we still had no sidewalks. Suburbs proper!

The sidewalks in my street were actually really funny. I’m going to remember them forever. I took the liberty of sketching out the bullshit that our town decided to do:

If you haven’t noticed, I do try to be funny sometimes. So the way I would ride my scooter sorta went like… I would go down to that end of the street, turn around. Ride the thirty good feet of sidewalk, which was pretty high-quality sidewalk actually! No roots. And then exit through someone’s driveway because the sidewalk itself just… stops in that second house’s grass. And then the rest of the way we got super hyped on this one long stretch of repaired asphalt, all smooth, and disappointed on the normal old, rough stuff (the actual street). That’s how it was my whole life through, until the very month I left home, when they milled the whole street down a couple inches and probably didn’t fix it until the snow came in.

The Problem

Now, I don’t know if everyone sees this, or if everyone feels this way. But the environment of my suburban childhood was pretty unhappy! I felt stuck, forever. Nowhere to go. And all the nice things in life just felt like sugar coating on the problem. Fundamentally, life was unhappy. And I knew it, and I have always pointed it out since I was small.

Over my lifetime, I always knew what I wanted, and what very literal things I didn’t have. And I learned to bring it home too: Making sure that if I did get something I wanted, I would appreciate its addition in my life as properly as I could. I was odd, maybe another word for unique or special, and my main goal in most of my life was to have a realistic viewpoint on the world. And I knew I was unhappy, and I knew later on that living in the city during those years would’ve been a genuine step up, giving me something the suburbs could never, ever, ever hope to give.

The problem is bad design. The solution is good design. It should be this simple.

The Solution – Is it to Move?

For me, I had an immediate solution, one that would have made me happy. Just move! And I’m about to move to a city and live a life that genuinely makes me happy, so there’s my issues handled. But I know most people, obviously, can’t do that, and even more obviously, wouldn’t even want to. It wouldn’t make them happy.

One of the reasons for the average suburbanite not wanting to move is that they don’t want to leave their comfort zone and find their own way in the world.

The other reason is that there are some genuine hardships to face in a lot of American inner cities, similar to what I described from my own childhood above. I think my mom did make the rational decision in moving me away, for example. Gun violence sucks, and if you can avoid it, I understand that. And people want safety, and will take it if they can. I don’t think I’d move to a dangerous city, because I’m not interested in being physically traumatized anymore, regardless of how crazy I am in still wishing I grew up in all that.

I would really like if people, adults, could weigh their options more carefully though. For their kids. Or for themselves too, maybe. I don’t know, I’ve never been an adult living in a city yet.

Plenty of adults with kids move out to the suburbs, since they started to exist, because it’s easier on them. Much easier. But it sucks for us! We enter the world as kids only into school and structured activities. We are given no patience to learn without judgement or consequence, unless our parents are saints, and our teachers too. We get to be a set of appointments to fit into their lives. Or, in my case, we just get left alone and not barely allowed outside as soon as possible.

See, people care for gun violence, kidnappings, happening to their kids. Statistical anomalies, even in gun-crazy America. But car accidents kill you just as much. And car accidents are normal.

Agh. When I get to this point in my writing, I always start to feel so lost. Frustrated, annoyed. I jump back and forth between wanting to say people really are just stupid, and wanting to show to the world that I believe that people really are just trying their best. I do believe people, parents included, really are just trying their best. And I don’t look down on people, okay? We’re supposed to be able to trust that the built environment is designed to be as safe as possible. We’re not stupid for trusting that. But, well, unfortunately the built environment is dangerous, and we keep building it, and we keep killing people by continuing to build it.

It’s the fault of every road-widening, car-speed-increasing project holding hands with every newer, larger passenger pickup truck. Civil and mechanical engineers. State organizations (or federal) and corporate interests. Well, okay, if you look at lobbying it’s actually mostly just the corporate interests driving all this.

We’re a funny country, funny side of the species. America.

Is it just that we can’t recognize a problem we live within? Do other people walk around and not realize that our environment… isn’t God-given anymore? (Not that I believe in a god). That we built all of this? That we built everything that now makes us so unhappy? Do other people not even realize how we are unhappy? Do other people not know what we’re missing?

Cars and their Very Important Infrastructure

My house in the second-ring suburbs (again, that’s the town behind the suburban town that touches the city) was the second residential block away from the busiest intersection for many miles. We got a lot of cars driving sorta fast down the street to bypass the light that took forever. And remember, we didn’t have sidewalks.

I won’t tell a false story. My caregivers never stopped me from going outside due to any risk of getting hit by a car. I was a smart kid, okay? I was safe.

But that didn’t really make the isolation any better. And I don’t think it would help for most of us either, in any other suburban environment, near to an intersection or far. For me, the isolation was from the mental pressure of being trapped. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to run. The world cut off by the huge roads full of very fast things that will kill you on impact and not even see you when it happens–a valid concern, even for a kid. So why even try? You have on-foot access to nearly nothing in this world, and there’s not even anything worth finding out anyways. You can’t even talk to your neighbors, because by this age in the history of suburban culture they don’t want to come outside into this hostile environment either. What’s there for them to see? It’s just depressing. Life is, what, traffic and the few safe havens in between, I fucking guess? And anyways, your parents told you everyone you’ll ever meet is probably dangerous. Stranger danger and all. Fear thy neighbor. See the worst in the world, taught from the start, and it gets stronger every generation, I see it. I see it in the people closest to me, and in acquaintances and the actions of strangers too. How suburbanites especially raise their kids. And it makes us broken, with an incomplete and incorrect worldview, and leaves us sorta stupid. Unknowing how to handle ourselves out here. Permanent adolescents like I said in my very first post. I meant it.

The Solution – Save Yourself First, Build Things Later

For me, the solution to my unhappiness was leaving home a little before I was ready, and making a move to a faraway country, about as far away as you can get actually, where I can have a fresh start. I don’t know a single soul there. But I wanted something I could build, somewhere stable I could set down roots without worrying about my future life’s work being ripped out of the ground due to any particular administration or group of lunatics or what have you. Somewhere I could be happy, and I wouldn’t have to suffer so hard.

I recommend that anyone young should do (their version of) the same. Get yourself into a good environment, because you can’t live without one, even if you can survive it. And don’t take no for an answer. You really only have to be strong and state your will for a little bit, or even just once, and the people holding you back will back off. Just get a little crazy with it. It’ll be satisfying and human and very, very fun. Being young isn’t the time to settle. It’s the time to be dramatic and annoying and get whatever you want.

Conclusion

I didn’t go too far into anything technical here. Honestly, most of my knowledge about the field isn’t technical yet. I’m only halfway through my civil engineering degree, and I’m taking a break for a while as well.

I have a final note, though:

A place is satisfying to live in if it was designed to be, and it doesn’t matter how many bad options we make, it doesn’t make the less-bad option make you happy. The people working together to design our built environments made our outer lives pretty lame compared to what they could’ve been, regardless of all this money we keep giving them.

In later posts, in fact with this entire blog, I do plan to write my own solution to such things. Today, I could only give a solution to being unhappy on an individual level, and it’s not even for everyone. It’s just words, and requires willpower that not everyone has. In the future, though, with my words and my work, I’m going to supply a solution that lands right on your doorstep, as easy to accept as an Amazon package, and is more suited to making everyone at any age and condition feel human and alive. Not globally, sorry, but locally for the community I chose. (But my words can reach everywhere)!

Quite extremely literally, my work in this field is going to be to (help) make the platform off of which everyone else lives their urban lives. A city worth living in!