For years, I’ve written this newsletter out of the DC area — bug-infested, humid, expensive, full of criminally insane Maryland drivers, and still endlessly beloved by me — and this week marks the first time I’m doing it from my new home, over a thousand miles away.
In the immortal words of the Dirty Heads, “If you don't like your life, then / You should go and change it” — even if it’s sometimes easier said than done.
Here’s the thing, though, it’s OK to change your life even if you like it. Major life changes don’t have to be an escape valve from horrifying adversity. There are simply days when you look around, take a deep breath, and say, “It’s time.”
In spite of all of the complaints I listed above (and those I did not list as there would be no room), I have loved and will continue to love DC and its surrounding areas with a fierce passion occasionally bordering on the foolish.
Both locals and the rest of America have a healthy contempt for DC, the seat of federal power, the land of staffers and consulting dweebs and congressional deadlock, and yet there is a romanticism to this area we’re too embarrassed to discuss, though I think most of us, nihilists aside, still feel it.
Maybe you feel it late at night when the Washington Monument peeks out from behind the trees on a long drive to somewhere ill-advised but interesting. Or when you sit in front of a painting at the National Gallery on a slow day. I most often felt it when I encountered tourists who reminded me of my father and me, bulky men in dad shorts and their reedy teenage daughters asking for directions or taking pictures on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
I spent the last couple of years of my DC life living across the Potomac in northern Virginia, a more easygoing place than the District of Columbia. I took friends to the restaurant where George Washington had birthday parties — check it out if you’re ever in Alexandria, it’s called Gadsby’s, and yes, it is haunted — starred in numerous debacles at local pubs (no details forthcoming, names withheld to protect the guilty), saw my son begin maturing into a young man, and did a lot of writing during quiet nights by Braddock Road.
As a naturalized American, I will always be drawn to places of power that contain bits and pieces of American history, and the air in northern Virginia is thick with that history (and that humidity).
When I first floated the idea of relocating to Colorado, some of my friends were surprised. I’ve always been interested in places of great intensity — I’ve lived in NYC, in Kyiv, in horrifying, no-good Moscow, and even in Dubai before eventually coming to DC — what was I going to do with myself on Mountain Time?
The truth was, with my uncle passing away and the rest of my U.S.-based family living in Denver, nothing much was holding me on the East Coast. I wanted to be closer to my relatives, and I was irritated with how the summers stretched into November and with the cost of living.
There was another truth. For years, I did the things I wanted in DC, writing and consulting people on OSINT, online safety, and Russian aggression, having bizarre adventures with my friends (the night I fell through a roof and got doused in champagne is a bolded footnote in my book of days), and witnessing events of national and global consequence.
I was curious about what would happen next, and life was feeding my curiosity in both cool and mortifying ways. One morning, I woke up and realized that I was content with all I’ve done since I started, and had nothing left to prove. You’d think this would be satisfying, but it was odd. The curiosity had left. What I saw in front of me was repetition.
One thing that’s terrible and awesome about DC is that you’re constantly surrounded by ambitious people.
The friends I made, the men and women I dated, were all on individual quests. I had been on one too, and then several professional milestones were reached (not that I can talk about them, shhhh), and I eventually noticed a quiet.
I got up, watered my plants, made coffee, packed my son’s school lunch, checked in with friends and relatives in Ukraine, and the quiet persisted.
“You don’t care,” a friend yelled in my ear at a loud bar he brought me to after I declared that my life had become strangely serene. “You’ve gone zen, Natalia.”
If there is one thing DC can’t abide by, it’s going zen. There are national and global crises to solve and agendas of varying degrees of controversial to promote, how the hell can anyone be zen? And yet I’d gone to the other side without noticing. That’s what the strange, ringing quiet in my life was about.
Even the war against my native country of Ukraine, and my constant sense of devastation over it, had become something I was adjusted to, even as I continued (and continue) fundraising efforts for warfighters, a part of my new normal.
All around me, people were questing, while I had become more invested in watching my son and tomato plant grow. It was age catching up to me, to be sure, but it was also something else, a warm, invisible hand on my shoulder, telling me that it was alright, I did good, it was time.
I’m not going to go into detail about the financial aspect of moving 1.5 thousand miles away — I may not cry about much these days, even when I would like to be able to, but I do want to cry when I crunch the numbers. Being able to make a drastic change like this is a sign of my relative privilege. Yet for the first time in a long time, I felt no guilt about major life expenses. The invisible hand on my shoulder remained steady.
What I do want to tell you about is our flight out West. Our things had been packed and readied for a long journey on a moving truck. My son was napping in his seat. Our scrappy DC shelter cat was purring as I petted her little head in the carrier.
We took off at dusk and chased the sun across the broad middle of our nation, storm clouds building castles below. Looking down through the holes in the clouds, I saw lights flickering in the towns as the sun slowly burned out for hours ahead, feeling as though we were dragging the summer night in on our tail.
I thought I’d be upset at leaving so much behind, but all I felt was a quiet and steady love and gratitude. For this country, this beautiful, powerful, constantly imperiled country. For my family. For my friends. For the invisible hand on my shoulder. I had no idea what would happen next. I still have no idea. If you know me, you know how much I love a big mystery.
We talk so much about changing our lives. Talking about it and doing it are two very different things. I’ve changed my life many times before, but for the first time, I’ve done it with a sense of lightness filling me up to my fingertips. I was no longer running. I was driven by my friend curiosity and my desire to see mountains again, Gandalf.
If you’ve read this far, don’t worry, I’m not going completely soft on you yet.
Planned for this summer are several important newsletter topics I’d like to cover on the Normie Restoration, including:
How to avoid cooking your brain on atrocity footage
How to talk to friends and family about the upcoming presidential election without beating each other up
Kitchen experiments with espresso martinis (an upcoming bonus feature)
How Twitter stats don’t mean anything as far as political stats are concerned
Expanding on my Foreign Policy piece about the loneliness epidemic as a national security crisis and discussing potential solutions
Thank you for reading and for sticking with me. Be good to yourselves out there.
Rocky Mountain high
Best of luck in Colorado! I hope it is everything you hoped it would be.