goodbye to all that

on loving and leaving washington, d.c.

the main street in mount pleasant, the northwest d.c. neighborhood where i spent most of my time, taken the night before i left for minneapolis

In the last few weeks and months before I moved to Minneapolis at the end of July, whenever people I encountered on dating apps and at parties asked me how long I’d lived in Washington, D.C., I always gave them the same answer: “on and off for about six years.” Vague though that response was, it was simpler than explaining that even though I had called this city home since the fall of 2018, when I first arrived there as a college freshman, my current stint of just under two years was the longest I’d ever spent consecutively living there. In my first year of college, of course, I returned home to the Twin Cities with some regularity for school breaks, and halfway through the spring semester of my sophomore year the onset of the pandemic sent me back to my parents’ house once again—this time, for the better part of a year. I returned to D.C. in January of 2021, moving into an off-campus apartment in the Adams Morgan area, and stayed there for around a year and a half before moving to London in September of 2022 to study at the London School of Economics. Master’s degree in hand, I returned once again to D.C. a year later, moving in with my partner at the time, and had been living there ever since.

In addition to being far more complicated than a simple “on and off for six years,” the above chronology also fails to adequately capture the full depth and intensity of the connection that I felt, and still feel, to D.C.—the fact that, despite the sporadic nature of the time I’ve spent in the city over the last several years, it still feels decidedly like home. To a certain extent, this is due to the fact that, having been my home for so many of my formative early adult years, the city has served as a backdrop to the development and sharpening of my own sense of self. In that sense, I suppose, I would likely feel this way about any city where I were to spend my college years and early 20s. And yet, there is no mistaking the fact that there is something about D.C. itself, something fundamental and ineffable, that shapes my connection to it.

Anyone who’s spent enough time in the District of Columbia will tell you that it’s really two cities—‘Washington’ and ‘D.C’—superimposed on top of one another. They may occupy the same 68-odd square miles north of the Potomac River, nestled comfortably in between Maryland and Virginia, but in reality they are worlds apart. ‘Washington’ is what usually comes to mind when people from elsewhere in the country think about the District of Columbia—the federal government, lobbyists, think tanks, all the backstabbing and corruption and dirty dealing that goes on ‘inside the Beltway.’ It’s not so much a city as a punching bag, a convenient shorthand for everything that people find dysfunctional and distasteful about the American political system. ‘D.C.’, on the other hand, is a real city, populated by 700,000 real people. D.C. is Chocolate City—the home of jazz and go-go, the half-smoke and mumbo sauce, its cultural landscape shaped as indelibly by the Salvadoran and Ethiopian communities who have made the District their home as by the Black inhabitants who, until the early 2010s, made up the majority of its population.

Like every American city, the District is undergoing rapid changes wrought by gentrification, with skyrocketing costs of living and accelerating rates of displacement. The bifurcation of the city’s identity into ‘Washington’ and ‘D.C.,’ however, means that gentrification in the District takes the unique form of a fierce and protracted struggle between these two identities, as Washington continues its relentless efforts to erase, displace, and replace D.C.

For all the grandiose claims about how “the city is your campus,” the picture of the District that the George Washington University’s admissions office paints for prospective students is very much one of Washington, not of D.C.—and when I first moved there in the fall of 2018 as an incoming GW freshman, I had no idea that such a distinction even existed. Like so many GW poli-sci majors, I harbored delusions of wanting to one day run for office—delusions that induce more than a little nausea when I think back on them now—and like most of my peers, I too saw the city as little more than a launchpad for an eventual political career. I lived on campus, safely ensconced in the infamous ‘Foggy Bottom Bubble’ that envelops the university, and apart from the occasional concert at the 9:30 Club or visit to my doctor’s office in Adams Morgan, my ‘exploration’ of the city rarely brought me much farther afield than Georgetown.

In other words, the District that I experienced as a GW student was little more than a hollow simulacrum of the real thing. As a result, I drifted through those first few years of college largely ignorant of the living, breathing city, with its own vibrant culture and deeply complicated history, hiding just beneath the monotone surface of monuments and government buildings and overpriced brunch restaurants—the same city to whose erasure GW, as the District’s largest private landowner and an entity which my peers and I often referred to as a real estate corporation masquerading as a university, was actively contributing. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of these dynamics in the abstract—I knew, of course, that the District was more than just the government and its various appendages, and that like any other major American city, it had undergone its own processes of gentrification and so-called ‘urban renewal’ over the last several decades that had fundamentally altered its culture, demographics, and built environment. What I didn’t quite grasp was that these processes were far from a fait accompli, that Washington had not yet entirely succeeded in its quest to destroy and replace D.C.—that just because all I could see when I looked around me was the former didn’t mean that the latter didn’t still exist.

It wasn’t until my return to D.C. in January of 2021, after a 9-month period of COVID-imposed exile, that I began to understand just how much I had been missing. Instead of living on campus, I moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the Lanier Heights section of Adams Morgan—my first ‘real’ apartment, and my first time living alone. The place was incredibly charming, perched on the top floor of a four-story brick building just above Rock Creek Park, with gorgeous hexagonal doorways and original wooden floorboards that creaked under my feet when I walked across them. The walls of the apartment were lined with large south-facing windows, and on summer afternoons the place would be flooded with warm light that filtered in through the leaves of the willow oak outside.

the living room of my first d.c. apartment, taken shortly after moving in

In many ways, though I first came to the District in 2018, I think back on my 2021 return as marking the moment that I really arrived there for the first time—certainly, it was my first time living in D.C. rather than in Washington. Living off campus, in a real neighborhood populated by real people—a far cry from the corporate soullessness of the downtown area surrounding GW—I found myself becoming suddenly aware of the city as more than a mere static backdrop for my insular collegiate experience. In other words, this was the time in my life when I first came to truly understand the difference between Washington and D.C.—and more importantly, this was the moment when I came to realize that everything I hated about the District was a product of the former, while everything I loved about it was a product of the latter.

Slowly but surely, the image that formed in my mind when I closed my eyes and thought about the city began to shift, its population of yuppie consultants and self-described ‘policy wonks’ that I found so distasteful replaced by a more diverse and compelling cast of characters—the young parents pushing strollers along the sidewalks of Lanier Heights and Mount Pleasant, the Salvadoran abuelas dragging grocery carts through the aisles of the Columbia Road Safeway, the gaggle of elderly Black men who held court every day at the 42/43 bus stop. (Of these last, one in particular—a retired Jamaican truck driver named Sam—sticks out to me more clearly than the others. I first made Sam’s acquaintance when, waiting for the bus one morning, I heard his voice behind me asking me if I played cricket. Exchanging pleasantries with him quickly became a fixture of my daily commute, and to my great surprise he still remembered me even after I returned from my year in London.)

All of this said, as significant of a turning point as moving to Adams Morgan was in my relationship to D.C., the truth is that I would never have come to appreciate the city in the way that I did were it not for the influence of my best friend, Izy. We had known each other since freshman year, and had grown close during our student-activist days organizing for fossil fuel divestment on campus, but it was really in the spring of 2021—particularly in those few months before COVID vaccines became widely available, when my social circle was limited by necessity to a tiny handful of people—that our relationship first began to blossom into what it is now, her role in my life resembling something more akin to that of a platonic soulmate than a mere friend.

By this point, we were in our third year of college, each of us beginning to carve out our own niches within our respective majors, and Izy’s specialization was D.C. history. (Her honors thesis on the 1970 D.C. sanitation workers’ strike remains, to this day, one of the most brilliant pieces of undergraduate scholarship I have ever read.) During social gatherings, whenever anyone began complaining about how boring the city was and how bland the people around us were—a not-infrequent topic of conversation among my peer group of fellow pretentious college students, who fancied ourselves decidedly more interesting than most of the people we encountered every day—Izy emerged as one of the District’s fiercest defenders, always quick to remind us that our complaints and condemnations only pertained to one small part of a much larger and more complex whole.

It was Izy who opened my eyes to the rich history of community activism and organizing that had shaped so many of the local programs and institutions that I had long taken for granted. For all the talk about this being a political town, she pointed out, hardly anyone ever paid any attention to the forms of grassroots political contestation whose battles played out in community meetings and neighborhood streets rather than in congressional hearing rooms and lobbyists’ offices. It was she who impressed on me as well just how significant it really was that D.C.—the first major American city to have a majority Black population—was denied the basic representation afforded to any other similarly self-governing U.S. polity. Thanks to her influence, I quickly came to recognize the issue of D.C. statehood, which had long existed in my mind as a relatively toothless liberal talking point, for what it really was—a fundamental question of self-determination and its denial to what effectively amounted to an internal colony of the United States.

There was a time, I learned through our conversations, when the statehood movement’s center of gravity lay not with well-funded NGOs and wealthy Dupont Circle liberals who just wanted two more Democratic seats in the Senate, but with grassroots activists and community groups fighting for Chocolate City’s right to govern itself. The current state of affairs—a piecemeal sort of quasi-autonomy known as ‘home rule’, in which the District is empowered to govern itself through an elected Mayor and Council but is subject to onerous oversight requirements and limitations on its powers by the federal government—came about in 1973 with the passage of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, a compromise that represented a significant step in the right direction but fell far short of genuine self-determination. I learned that in the decades since the Home Rule Act was passed, the limited autonomy granted to D.C. under the Act has come under attack countless times, with Congress blocking, overturning, or otherwise amending local laws ranging from criminal justice reforms and the legalization of cannabis to the definition and proscription of marital rape. For all its flaws, Izy explained to me, home rule had to be defended against these assaults at all costs.

• • •

My most recent, and perhaps final, departure from D.C. comes at a moment when national political developments have begun to throw these contradictions into even starker and more harrowing relief than before. Of the many egregious positions that Donald Trump has taken, first as a candidate and now as President, one that has not received nearly enough attention or outrage from people living outside of D.C. itself—owing, I suppose, to the American public’s general lack of awareness that there even exists a D.C. beyond Washington—is his longstanding and rabid hostility to the very idea of a self-governing District. Particularly since the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020, Trump has repeatedly invoked D.C. as the paradigmatic example of the failures of Democratic municipal governance, portraying it as a crime-ridden urban wasteland in desperate need of a strong federal hand to guide it. Upon Trump’s return to power in January of this year, many in D.C.—myself included—feared that, in addition to the countless other horrors that candidate Trump had promised to enact once in office, the new administration would seize the opportunity to go after home rule as well.

Those fears have proven not to be altogether unfounded. In March, Trump signed an executive order to “Make Our Nation’s Capital Safe and Beautiful,” establishing an interdepartmental federal task force and ordering it to crack down on “drug use, unpermitted demonstrations, vandalism, and public intoxication” by “[surging] law enforcement officers in public areas;” “maximize immigration enforcement to apprehend and deport dangerous illegal aliens;” and “keep dangerous criminals off the streets by strengthening pre-trial detention policies.” The effects of this order were swift and palpable—particularly in terms of a dramatically increased police presence across the city, an alarming increase in immigration enforcement activity, and a severe crackdown on even the most minor instances of public consumption of alcohol and cannabis—and only contributed to a general sense among most of the people around me that the D.C. we knew and loved was under attack.

In the last week or so, the attacks on D.C.’s self-determination have only intensified. A few days after my return to Minneapolis, a friend informed me that Trump was now threatening more openly than ever before to “federalize” the District’s government after one of his former DOGE staffers was attacked and beaten during an attempted carjacking. “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” Trump wrote in an August 5th post on Truth Social after the assault, “we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run.” A day later, Trump confirmed in a press conference that his lawyers “are already studying” the possibility of overturning D.C. home rule. (Such a move would require an act of Congress, but legislation to repeal home rule was already introduced in February by Senator Mike Lee and Representative Andy Ogles—both far-right MAGA Republicans.) On the evening of Thursday, August 7th, Trump announced that federal law enforcement officers from multiple agencies, including ICE, would be deployed in increased numbers on the streets of D.C. And in a press conference on Monday, August 11th, Trump announced that he would be placing the D.C. police under federal control and deploying hundreds of National Guard troops in the city in a bid to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.”

a banner displayed prominently in mount pleasant’s central plaza, july 2025

Watching all of this from afar, it’s been hard not to feel as though my leaving D.C. constitutes a sort of betrayal of the city that has given so much to me over the years, and has played such a pivotal role in shaping me into the person who I am. In more ways than one, I’ve come to think of D.C. as my second home, and there can be little question that I owe it an immense debt of gratitude. And yet, just as the going started to get tough, I skipped town and moved on to greener pastures. The timing of all this, of course, was purely coincidental—my decision to leave D.C. to pursue a PhD elsewhere had nothing to do with the national political climate; in fact, this had been the plan ever since my return from London nearly two years ago. But even so, it’s been hard to shake the sense of guilt that I feel at abandoning D.C. in this particularly dark moment—the undeniable, if imperfect, parallels between my experience and that of the countless other transplants who move to this city as students, stay for as long as is personally convenient to them, and then move on to the next thing.

Thinking about the timing of my departure from D.C., and of the dire circumstances that happen to have coincided with it, I am reminded of Molly Crabapple’s haunting reflection on the impact that the COVID pandemic had on New York City, first delivered as a lecture in December 2020 at the Brooklyn Public Library and later published as an essay in Literary Hub. At the beginning of the pandemic, Crabapple writes,

most of those who left [New York] were rich. They left blithely, as if from a nightclub that was no longer cool . . . [They] had had their good years. They dined, consumed, and profited. Over three decades, they had dulled the city to their generic, Connecticut tastes, driving out so many of us in the process. When a bad year came, they felt no responsibility. Why would they? They only had ties to each other.

Of course, the parallels between my situation and that of the yuppie New York transplants whom Crabapple derides—exemplified in the essay by the archetypal character of ‘Hedge Fund Brett’—only go so far. Unlike them, my departure had nothing to do with it being a ‘bad year’—and more importantly, unlike them, I did feel (and still do feel) a profound sense of connection and responsibility to the city that I left behind. Watching the Trump Administration’s current assault on D.C.’s sovereignty unfold, even from halfway across the country, I find myself consumed by an overwhelming sense of horror—not unlike how it felt, during the Minneapolis uprisings in 2020, to watch the city where I was born come under active military occupation. In other words, it’s precisely because I feel so connected to D.C. that I feel such guilt at having left.

But that’s not the case for everyone. For every transplant like myself and the friends I surrounded myself with in D.C., who feel that intense love for and connection to the city even after saying goodbye to it, there are many more for whom that is not at all the case. They exist in the District in much the same way that Crabapple writes about Hedge Fund Brett and his friends existing in New York—taking up residence in a few insular pockets of NoMa and Navy Yard; maintaining ties only to one another and to others in their same white-collar, GW- and Georgetown-educated milieu; dulling the city to their generic, New Jersey tastes. I know this to be true, because I went to college with many of them. I still see the Instagram stories they post of brunches at Le Dip and Saturday nights out on 14th Street. I still see, on the vanishingly rare occasions when I open LinkedIn, their posts announcing new positions at consulting firms and Congressional offices. I know without even needing to ask that these people are denizens of Washington through and through, who have never so much as set foot in D.C.—that even though we have shared the city for the same amount of time, their understanding and appreciation of the place where they live has not expanded far beyond where it was when we were college freshmen.

What will these people do as things in D.C. continue to get worse? What reason will they have to stay in this place to which they feel no allegiance, no responsibility? Already, so many of them—government and non-government employees alike—have had their employment jeopardized by federal funding cuts, fraying the most concrete tie binding them to the District. Those who have remained untouched by these changes likely have the sort of remote jobs that they can do from anywhere with an internet connection; there is no reason, in other words, why they (overwhelmingly liberal Democrats) should remain in a city that is currently in the midst of a full-fledged MAGA takeover. If things continue in the direction that they are, how much longer will these people stick around? When they do finally leave, what—and who—will they be leaving behind? And after they have moved on and settled into their new lives in other cities, frequenting the same types of places with the same types of people in the same types of neighborhoods, how much thought will they give to what became of the city inhabited by those who had no choice but to stay?

And what about them, the ones who stay behind? Crabapple ends her essay with the line: “The city belongs to those who love it enough to stay.” No matter how many people leave the District in the months and years ahead, there will always be countless more who cannot—and will not—follow them. These are the people who will watch the city’s dramatic transformation unfold, in whatever form it ends up taking, before their eyes; they are the ones who will feel the brunt of and bear witness to the horrors and injustices of the coming crackdown. And when the time comes, it is from their ranks that resistance to the federal government’s depredations will ultimately be drawn.

• • •

Just a few months ago, the streets of Los Angeles erupted into unrest as protests against ICE raids were met with brutal repression by the state. Seeing the images of National Guardsmen and Marines occupying the city, the footage of tear gas being deployed and journalists being assaulted on camera, it was hard not to find myself transported back to exactly five years ago, when nearly identical scenes were playing out on the streets of Minneapolis and countless other cities across the country in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. This was, to my knowledge, the first large-scale instance of street protest spiraling into civil unrest since the 2020 uprisings, and I remember wondering at the time whether the situation in LA might, as 2020 threatened for a moment to do, spread and escalate into something much larger and more difficult to control—the sort of situation that poses more of an existential threat to the stability and legitimacy of the present regime. That is not, of course, how things ended up playing out; the unrest had largely died down within a week or so of the protests starting. Nevertheless, the LA protests demonstrated clearly the fact that the seeds of of popular discontent against the Trump administration’s fascistic excesses have already been sown, that they can burst through the surface of the earth and out into the sunlight at any moment.

It’s far too early, of course, to know how things will unfold in D.C. in the coming weeks and months. But it’s not impossible to envision a situation in which home rule is repealed, the militarization of the District’s streets is intensified, and the contradictions between Washington and D.C. that have been simmering beneath the surface for years finally reach a breaking point. There are many factors that have long combined to make the District something of a powder keg—the city’s intense social, economic, and geographic stratification; the function it serves as the nation’s capital, making it the backdrop for all the fractiousness and volatility of America’s national-level politics; the fact that its status as the seat of power also means it faces a unique degree of scrutiny and potential for state repression. D.C., after all, was a key epicenter of the uprisings that broke out in urban centers across the country in the aftermath of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968; during the summer of 2020, some of the most egregious images of police repression and brutality outside of Minneapolis came out of the District.

It’s easy to imagine something similar happening again—perhaps on the scale of what we saw in LA earlier this summer, perhaps larger. The nature of these things, however, is that they are impossible to predict until they actually happen. Everything is normal, until one day it’s not. If and when that does finally happen, I know that the comrades alongside whom I have been organizing for the last two years—both those whom I count among my closest friends and those whom I know only by their aliases—will be on the front lines of whatever comes to pass. I know also that whatever feelings of guilt, whatever sense that I have abandoned D.C. in an hour of need, that I feel now will pale in comparison to what I will feel watching it all unfold from afar.

But that, I suppose, is just the way it goes. You move to a city, make your life there, even come to identify with it in your own way—but when you inevitably move on, time does not stop for you. The city, and all of the people and places and things that comprise it, continue to grow and to change, sometimes to the point of becoming unrecognizable, and all you can really do is hold on to the hope that those who stayed behind when you left will be able to weather those changes as best they can. In that sense, leaving a city that you’ve come to call home is not unlike the end of a long and rather serious relationship—you spend so much time intertwining your life with someone else, and when your paths diverge and you go your separate ways, you suddenly lose the window into the other person’s life that you had long since come to take for granted.

I suppose it’s fitting, then, that the timing of my departure from D.C. coincided more or less with the dissolution, some months ago, of my relationship with the woman with whom I had moved in upon my return from London—a relationship whose development was, in its own way, profoundly tied up with the development of my relationship with the city itself. Things between us ended amicably, and I have no regrets whatsoever about the three and a half years that she and I spent together—on the contrary, our relationship was crucial to my developing into the person who I am today—but at the same time, I know that things ended when they did for a reason, that it would not have done either of us any good to try and continue on past a certain point. In a similar vein, by the end of my time in D.C., the profound love and loyalty that I felt to the city was accompanied by the inescapable feeling that if I stuck around for too much longer, I would be in some way overstaying my welcome.

To paraphrase my favorite Joan Didion essay, “Goodbye to All That”:

There were years when I still thought of D.C. as ‘Washington,’ but they seem a long time ago.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer and organizer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe and receive new essays in your inbox: