7 years a stranger
I still believe in Nashville
One month from today, I turn 29. A week before that marks seven years in Nashville. My longest stretch of time in any one place outside of my childhood homes, and even then, my time was split between houses, never in one room for more than a few nights in a row. Here, I have slept on the exact same mattress for seven years.
I arrived here breathless, broke (emphasis on this part), 21, sweating in the August heat on the south side of town. Me and my blue Mercury Sable full of everything I could squeeze into it. I moved here on a job offer with a pitiful salary that would barely cover my $700 rent, and then, on my very first day here, I got another (cooler, or so I thought) job offer at a record label for even less money and quit the original one before I had even started. I had no roadmap. I had no plans, no strategy. Just a vision of somebody different I could become if I let the city mold me into a new person. And mold me it sure did.
I often try to think about what went through my mind when I chose Nashville as The Place I Have To Go, because there was never one singular moment. More like a feeling that crept in without my noticing it. A year and a half before moving, I had never even been here, and certainly had not considered living here. My first trip to Beautiful Music City was a one-night jaunt down south for a Halfnoise show at a Chinese restaurant in a strip mall. That night changed my life in no small way (more on this in the future—it’s exactly as silly as it sounds), and then I spent the following 18 months ready to graduate, applying for every music job in Middle Tennessee within minutes of each posting, eager to start my shiny new life in the South.
In hindsight, all I really wanted was to run away, and this felt like the most logical place to which I could run. 20 years of compressing my anxiety into a heavy stone in my chest had unraveled me entirely at the start of my senior year of college, and instead of dealing with it practically, the only solution I could find was to escape and hope it couldn’t catch up to me (spoiler alert: it did). But I had already made friends in Nashville—I was coming down here almost monthly to visit and get to know the city and spending time with them. I knew I could work in the music industry down here, and I believed, truly and naively, that I could become someone new here. I didn’t know who New Carly would be, but I knew that she would be different, and that promise was more than enough to pack my bags on.
Nashville wasn’t what I expected at first. It was hotter and lonelier. The mosquitos bit me differently. My GPS rerouted constantly. My apartment walls were thin and there was a new cockroach every other day (I had never even seen one in real life before moving here. My god, they are awful). I constantly found myself crying at Kroger, at Target, in various parking lots across town. But still, I chose Nashville. I stayed and I chose to continue to shed the hardened chrysalis around me. I stuck tweezers inside my heart and tried to force the butterfly to emerge.
For a few months, the new skyline helped slow the ever-churning anxiety. That and the fact that I was working three minimum-wage jobs at a time, taking photos as frequently as I could, all on top of an unpaid, internship-adjacent arrangement with a producer in town. It all kept me so busy I didn’t have time to unravel. Until I did. Slowly, over the course of my first few months here, and then all at once, the panic caught up to me like a flood. It knocked me flat. I went back home to see a doctor and get on medication.
In the months that followed, I worked on healing from the inside out. I took myself apart, piece by piece, shifting my body out of survival mode and into something softer. I let go of the eight-jobs grind and got a sweet, slow job at a plant shop, where I let the dirt get under my fingernails. Everything was new to me—paying bills, buying groceries, taking my old car to the shop alone. I had never been a real adult before, and yet, for some reason, I chose to do it for the first time several hundred miles from my family. I called my dad every single day with a new problem, fear, or anxiety, and he listened, loving this version of me into existence.
Almost exactly a year after moving here, I got my first full-time office job—customer service at a glasses company, answering emails and fielding calls from people yelling about broken frames. I was making $32,000 a year. The most money I had ever made. I felt rich beyond my wildest dreams. I settled into the rhythm of driving downtown five days a week, handling disgruntled customers by day and taking photos at shows by night. I was busy, buzzing. Exhilarated. Freelance work was starting to trickle in, and I began to naively daydream about freelancing full-time someday soon.
Then Covid happened. And I won’t talk about that because it was stupid, but those daydreams obviously did not come to fruition.
In between complaining calls from glasses wearers taken in my bedroom, I started applying for music jobs again. Eventually, I landed one that felt like my Dream Job: “Creative Manager” at a music marketing company. Paid to be “creative” full-time. It should have been everything I wanted—except once the shine of a fancy new job with a big fancy computer and an Adobe subscription wore off, it was a nightmare. The most toxic work environment I’d ever endured, the kind of place that makes you question your worth and your instincts and your sanity. Psychological damage that I still find myself recovering from every now and then. But I stayed long enough to learn what I didn’t want, and even while I was working there, I was building something else.
Nights and weekends, I was still photographing shows, still telling stories, still trying to inch closer to the work I actually loved. I offered to shoot for free for anyone who would let me. I built a portfolio from scratch, and slowly—very slowly—people started trusting me with their creative vision. Every shoot gave me something new: a little more grit, a little more clarity, a little more reason to keep chasing my dream, whatever that was. I would clock out from a restaurant shift or a customer service shift and head straight to a venue, camera in hand. I obviously didn’t do it for money. I did it because I needed to, because I didn’t know what else to do with all the wanting inside me. I had to make something. And eventually, the things I made started to reach people, and my work started to speak for itself.
Then I joined the team at WNXP almost 2 years ago and it felt like the first job that didn’t ask me to shrink or contort myself, and it’s work that I genuinely enjoy and feel extremely passionate about. The work had finally caught up to the dream, and it feels, frankly, really nice.
Now, I would be lying if I said I don’t grieve what Nashville used to be when looking at what it’s become. In one of her new (unreleased at the time of writing) songs “True Believer,” Hayley Williams sings:
Tourists stumble down Broadway
Cumberland keeps claiming bodies
All our best memories were bought and then turned into apartments
The club with all the hardcore shows now just a grayscale Domino's
The churches overflow each Sunday, greedy Sunday morning
Even though I have only been here for seven years, the way I’ve watched Nashville change has been startling. I am certainly not the authority on Old Nashville, but I know what it was when I came and I know where it is now, and it feels like the soul of this city is being repackaged and resold back to us, sanitized and hollowed out. Everyone’s best memories flipped into Airbnb listings. Restaurants closing from the high cost of rent (RIP to The Wild Cow, I think about you every day). I see it everywhere. Crosses and Bible verses tattooed on people who have never prayed for anyone but themselves. The skyline clawing higher each month while neighbors fall through the cracks. There are too many condos and not enough light. Sometimes it genuinely feels as though the city is being devoured from the inside out by itself, but I still love its ghosts. I still see the shimmer of something sacred, right in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the harmony of strangers laughing at a show, in the murals painted over and over again. I still love Nashville’s bones, even when I barely recognize the skin.
Before Nashville, I’d never been a regular anywhere. There aren’t really businesses in Small Townsburg, Indiana where you could be a “regular” before the age of 18. Then I went off to college, and I suppose I could have been considered a regular at the campus Starbucks (the only coffee shop on campus, mind you), but everyone was a regular there. It doesn’t count. But here, people knew my name before I even unpacked all of my bags. The coffee shop around the corner knows my order. It is a very special kind of magic—the small, consistent noticing that makes me feel entirely real. I don’t know if I was a real person until I got here. At least I don’t think I was. Now I can’t leave my house without seeing a friendly face. I see friends at every show I go to, my favorite restaurant knows my order, the bartender at my favorite dive knows what beer I want. I want to say it’s a blessing and a curse, but really, it’s a blessing to be known, especially when I have never felt that before moving here. You become someone just by showing up often enough. I don’t think I realized how badly I wanted to be known until it started happening.
There’s something really beautiful to be said about the community I’ve found here and the friends who have held me up in ways that I never could have imagined. So much, in fact, that I think I could write a whole other piece about it instead of going on here, and I’m sure I will someday.
At 21, I didn’t know how to be alone. As I previously mentioned, the mere act of staying in one place by myself for 3 months led me to the most intense and debilitating mental breakdown of my entire life. Now, nearly 29, I am good at being alone. I love it, in fact. I’ve learned how to love the quiet, learned to find comfort in how solitude and silence feel in my body. Waking up in my quaint one-bedroom on the east side, drenched in the sunlight first thing in the morning, getting to do work that excites me and energizes me every day. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.
I came here wanting to belong to something. Seven years later, I belong to myself. Feels pretty good.
Here’s a (very brief) trip down memory lane over the last 7 Augusts.
Thanks for reading. It’s been a good and bad and weird and special 7 years of my life here in good ol’ Music City. Here’s to 70 more, probably. Go listen to some old country music on my behalf.
Glasses job…invisible string
this was such a heartfelt read, you have such a way with words !!!