What Leaving East of the River Taught Me About DC - and Myself

This editorial was also sent as a separate email on September 8, 2026.

In 2019, when I made the decision to leave East of the River, the Washington City Paper covered the story, The Queen of Congress Heights Is Moving West of the River.

At the time, I was burnt out. Really burnt out.

But there was another reason I wanted to leave the part of the city that had become so central to my life and identity.

I wanted to experience Washington from somewhere else.

I wanted to live in other parts of DC. I wanted to see the city from different windows, walk different blocks, meet different neighbors and experience different versions of "community."

Most importantly, I wanted to understand what united us—and, unfortunately, what did not.

I wanted to see firsthand how people in different neighborhoods thought about community, gentrification, development, and NIMBYism. Who welcomed change? Who feared it? Who benefited from it? Who was expected to bear its costs?

And I wanted to better understand what was happening as the Chocolate City I arrived in back in 1995 continued its transformation into a city becoming less Black every day.

I have to admit: the adjustment wasn't easy.

Crying in the Cereal Aisle

My first move was to Trinidad, into a large apartment building facing Bladensburg Road.

In many ways, the surrounding neighborhood wasn't completely unfamiliar. It faced some of the same systemic, financial, and public-safety challenges I had seen in neighborhoods east of the river.

But then something happened that I still remember vividly.

Not long after moving, I walked to a grocery store—one of three near my apartment.

And somewhere in the middle of that store, I started crying.

I was standing in the cereal aisle.

There wasn't anything particularly remarkable about the grocery store. That was precisely the problem.

I could simply walk from my apartment and buy fresh food. I had choices. I had access.

And suddenly I was overwhelmed by guilt, thinking about people in my former Ward 8 community who didn't have those same options.

I had been able to move.

So many other people couldn't.

I just stood there crying in the cereal aisle, feeling guilty that something as simple as changing my address had changed something as fundamental as my access to food.

I've never forgotten that feeling.

Because it taught me something about inequity that statistics never could.

Sometimes the distance between two very different experiences of Washington, DC, is just a few miles.

Then Came NoMa

A few years later, I moved again—this time to NoMa, into a newly constructed "luxury" apartment building.

And I put luxury in quotation marks intentionally.

Because if you've lived in DC long enough, you learn that "luxury" can be as much a marketing term as an actual description. Put in some quartz countertops, a rooftop, and a package room, and apparently we're ready to go.

But NoMa represented something else for me.

It put me right in the middle of a part of Washington that looked almost nothing like the place I remembered when I first came to DC in 1995.

I remember the Burger King off Florida Avenue. And yes, I bought a lot of Whoppers there.

I remember when the area around the old Florida Avenue Market felt completely different—before "Union Market" became a destination and a brand.

It was messy. It was gritty. It was interesting.

It was authentic.

Was everything better then? Of course not.

But sometimes I miss it.

I feel the same way about The Wharf.

I can appreciate the restaurants, bars, entertainment, and all the shiny new things while still mourning some of what disappeared to make room for them.

Those two feelings can exist at the same time.

That's one of the things I think gets lost in our conversations about development in DC.

You can appreciate investment without pretending displacement doesn't hurt.

You can want safer streets without believing longtime residents should have to disappear before those streets receive attention.

You can enjoy a new restaurant and still wonder about the restaurant—or family, or business, or culture—that used to occupy that space.

You can support development and still ask:

Development for whom?

Three Years in NoMa

I've now spent about three years living in NoMa.

And I've learned something else.

Things aren't always what they're cracked up to be.

Beautiful buildings don't automatically create community.

Density doesn't necessarily create connection.

Proximity doesn't guarantee relationships.

There can be silos of life.

Silos of friendships.

Silos of experiences.

And silos of disappointment.

I could write much more about that, but I'm not going to—not today.

Partly because I don't have enough space to unpack it all.

And partly because I've recently learned that sharing the pain in my heart about some of my experiences, particularly those connected to my identity, hasn't always been the best thing for my social life.

That realization has been painful in its own way.

So right now, I'm sitting with some things.

I'm coming to terms with some truths—or, perhaps more accurately, the truths as I have experienced them.

The past few months have been very hard for me.

New alliances have formed, and others have been lost or changed. There have been new illnesses that have forced me to think differently about my body, my time, and my energy.

And I've come to realize that, even after all these years, an "otherness" still permeates this city.

Sometimes it is loud.

More often, it is subtle.

It's who gets welcomed into a space and who merely gets tolerated.

It's whose anger is considered justified and whose is considered threatening.

It's whose concerns become neighborhood priorities and whose are dismissed as resistance to progress.

It's who gets to define what "community" means after arriving somewhere—and who is expected to quietly accept that new definition.

And sometimes it's simply realizing that being surrounded by people doesn't necessarily mean you belong.

That has left me heartbroken.

The Tears Nobody Sees

For nearly two months now, I have cried every single day.

Every day.

Sometimes the tears are for myself.

Sometimes they're for the world.

Sometimes they're for people I love.

Sometimes I don't even know exactly who or what they're for anymore.

And sometimes I cry because my heart hurts so much that, in that moment, I can't see my way out of the hurt.

There are tears of disappointment. Tears of loneliness. Tears of exhaustion. Tears for things lost and things I thought I had but perhaps never did.

And then there are tears because I don't always feel like I have the allowance to have any of those tears in the first place.

Because even grief can become something you have to manage for other people's comfort.

How much can I say?

How much hurt am I allowed to show?

How many times can I admit that something wounded me before my pain itself becomes the problem?

When does vulnerability stop inspiring empathy and start making people uncomfortable?

When does a Black woman's sadness get translated into anger?

I don't know.

What I do know is that some days I have wiped away the tears, gotten dressed, answered emails, advocated for somebody else, made somebody laugh, solved somebody's problem, written something encouraging, shown up for work, shown up for my community, and simply kept moving.

Because that's what I know how to do.

And then I have gone home and cried again.

There is an exhaustion in being expected to be strong when what you desperately want is permission to simply be hurt.

Not inspirational.

Not resilient.

Not "strong."

Just hurt.

And human.

I think that is part of what I'm trying to say here.

I don't need every person to understand my pain.

But I wish there were more room for me to have it without someone else deciding that my pain is an indictment of them—or a flaw in me.

The Price of Saying It Out Loud

And if I know one thing within my soul—one thing without a shred of doubt—it is that writing this essay will cost me.

This isn't the first time I've written about these things. It is the latest in several attempts to put words to experiences that are deeply personal to me.

And each time I do, I understand a little more clearly that there can be a price for saying them out loud.

I expect I will pay one for this, too.

I may lose more "friends."

People I once considered friends may become acquaintances. Others may voluntarily drop out of my life altogether.

Because sometimes being me is too much.

Being my friend may require choosing a side when you would rather remain neutral. It may require inconvenience. It may require being uncomfortable—even if only for a few minutes—about things some of us experience for a lifetime.

Microaggressions.

Stereotypes.

Pain.

Otherness.

And perhaps another expectation lies beneath all of this: that we learn to keep quiet about those experiences while still bringing the "magic" that benefits everyone else.

Be smart.

Be strong.

Be resilient.

Be funny.

Be helpful.

Be the advocate.

Bring the perspective.

Bring the culture.

Bring the magic.

Just don't bring the pain.

Because the pain makes people uncomfortable.

I may lose credibility with people who once respected my voice.

I may find myself unwelcome in spaces where I once believed I belonged.

And I may be branded with one of the oldest, most effective, and most painful labels available for dismissing a Black woman's voice:

The Angry Black Woman.

Something difficult.

Something unreasonable.

Something to fear.

Something people need to protect themselves from.

And perhaps most painfully, expressing my hurt may itself be used as evidence against me.

Instead of asking why I am hurting, someone can simply point to the fact that I expressed that hurt and say: See? This is exactly what we mean.

It is a trap Black women spend our lives trying to outrun.

We learn to measure our words.

Watch our tone.

Control our faces.

Swallow an emotion before someone else can weaponize it.

We learn that sometimes we must describe something painful without appearing too hurt by it.

Challenge something without seeming confrontational.

Disagree without appearing angry.

Advocate for ourselves while simultaneously reassuring everyone around us that we are not a threat.

And somehow remain likable while doing it.

Even writing those words makes me wonder how they will be received.

Because one of the harder truths I've had to come to terms with is that who I am—and the pain and hurt that sometimes come with navigating this city as who I am—can become secondary the moment talking about it makes someone else uncomfortable.

My pain can be real.

But someone else's discomfort with hearing about my pain can somehow become the bigger problem.

There is a peculiar kind of loneliness in realizing that honesty can cost you relationships.

That saying, "This hurt me," can be treated as a greater offense than whatever caused the hurt in the first place.

And Yet, I'm Writing It

Maybe this essay will cost me friendships.

Maybe someone will read it and decide I am bitter, difficult, divisive, or angry.

Maybe someone will question my credibility because I allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to admit that underneath the advocacy, the work, the writing, and the public face is a human being who can actually be hurt.

Maybe someone I care about will read this and pull farther away.

Maybe someone will recognize themselves in these words even though I have named no one.

I can't control that.

What I can control is whether fear of those consequences makes me silent.

And I don't want it to.

When I left East of the River in 2019, part of what I wanted was perspective.

I got it.

Just not always in the ways I expected.

Living in different parts of DC has reminded me that Ward boundaries don't tell the whole story of this city. Neither do neighborhood names, new developments, crime statistics, median incomes, or restaurant openings.

People do.

Despite all of our talk about being one city, Washington can still feel like several very different cities occupying the same 68 square miles.

There is extraordinary generosity here. There are people building genuine community every day. I have experienced that, too.

But enormous differences also shape how we experience Washington, depending on where we live, what we look like, how much money we have, when we arrived, and whether the changes happening around us are being done for us, with us, or to us.

Nearly seven years after leaving East of the River, I don't have a neat conclusion.

I probably have more questions.

But I know I'll never forget standing in that cereal aisle crying.

And maybe that's why finding myself crying again all these years later feels significant.

The circumstances are different.

But underneath both are questions about access.

Back then, I was thinking about who had access to something as basic as fresh food.

Today, I'm thinking about another kind of access:

Who gets access to empathy?

Who gets the benefit of the doubt?

Who gets permission to hurt?

Who gets to say, "This happened to me," without immediately being asked to make the story easier for everyone else to hear?

Because underneath the new buildings, neighborhood rebrandings, Michelin-starred restaurants, bike lanes, dog parks, grocery stores, and rooftop pools is still the question I've spent much of my life in DC asking:

Who gets to fully experience everything this city has to offer—and who doesn't?

And now I have another question:

When we say we want "community," are we willing to build one that has room for people whose experiences, backgrounds, and truths make us uncomfortable?

I don't know the answer.

What I do know is that I have spent too many years writing about who gets heard in this city to decide that my own voice is the one I should be afraid to use.

So I'm writing this knowing there may be a price.

I'm just no longer certain that staying silent wouldn't cost me more.