Late last Thursday, I returned home to Northampton from a three-day business trip. For a year now, I’ve lived in this city in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, perhaps best known as “Lesbianville USA” and the home of Smith College, one of five liberal arts colleges that shape the culture and landscape of the area.
As I drove towards downtown where I live, past the bike shop and art collaborative and one of so many coffee shops, I had a weird feeling that I can only describe as being slowly lowered into a vat of soup. Comforting, but also uncomfortable. There’s the excitement of discovery — what have I yet to find here? — mixed with the overwhelm of mess and disorder.
I’ve lived here for a year now. But am I home?
This feeling contrasted with the sense I got just a few days prior driving into Ipswich, the coastal town north of Boston where the business meeting had been held at my company’s headquarters. In my mid-twenties, after a breakup, I moved there for the job and got a cheap studio overlooking downtown.
I lived there for four years, building routine, resilience, and a sense of Self that quickly destabilized as soon as I moved away. Coming back to Ipswich felt like coming home in a more traditional sense. Like familiarity — I know these streets, I used to walk them every day — and wistful nostalgia.
In a lot of ways, my move to Northampton (otherwise known as “Hamp” or “Noho”) last spring mirrored my move to Ipswich several years prior. It was after a breakup. I moved to a town where no one knew me and got a small apartment on the top floor of a commercial building in the most central downtown spot where I could be alone and yet in the center of everything.
People even called me out on the parallels. Consciously or not, I think I was trying to recreate my Ipswich experience in hopes of building back that same sense of Self that I’d felt before.
Well, as it turns out, Northampton is not like Ipswich. And Hamp, and life, has had other plans.
I decided to move to Northampton not just because of its visible queer culture (though that’s a perk!), but because of its multitude of coffee shops, bookstores, and green spaces. I knew I wanted to live somewhere I could easily walk out of my apartment and work from somewhere else and be around other humans. The few times I’d visited Noho on day drips, the feeling of being somewhere “Made for Me” felt uncanny, if not a bit uncomfortable.
In that respect, Northampton has fulfilled my expectations. It’s wonderful to live somewhere that knows many of my cultural references and context. Like, where else besides Northampton would the public library have a diorama of Madwimmin Books from Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For?
I’ve been asked for my pronouns so many times, it’s fabulous. Even my dentist used they/them pronouns for me by default. More than once I’ve been mistaken for someone else, stopped on the street or in a cafe to ask how I am until the person realizes I’m not who they think I am—probably some other bookish androgyne with Doc Martens. Probably a “Smithie” (the local slang for Smith students).
I’ve embraced some of the more stereotypical aspects of Northampton culture that I never imagined I would. I built a bicycle and learned to ride again. I went on a 27-hour date that spiraled into a whirlwind sapphic romance. I went to numerous farmers markets and artisan fairs. I attended a yoga class and took part in a protest. I grew peppers and even learned how to pickle them. I feel like I’ve done just about everything “Noho” short of buying a pair of Birkenstocks (never say never!).
And yet, there’s a big aspect to Northampton culture that I had not anticipated. One that is harder to define. I think it has something to do with the power and pitfalls of counterculture.
On the one hand, I’ve never lived anywhere that’s so community-oriented. I can walk into any coffee shop downtown and see bulletin boards loaded with overlapping flyers for classes, services, surveys, shows, you name it. I’ll admit I didn’t know what NOTAFLOF meant until I moved here and started seeing it everywhere. There’s a spirit of mutual aid, looking out for each other, everyone grab your guitar and sing! Unsurprisingly I also live within walking distance of no less than eight pot dispensaries.
The 1960s dream of free love, liberation, power to the people is still alive in Northampton. I love this! It’s fun and it’s hopeful. Though I often feel like the one weirdo working from home with a nine-to-five corporate job.
“Northampton wears its heart on its sleeve unlike anywhere else I’ve lived before.”
But like with any counterculture that’s swimming against the powerful current of patriarchy and white supremacy, there’s just so much visible trauma everywhere. This environment, compounded with what I learned are the continued effects of the 1993 closure of Northampton State Hospital, creates a sense of communal care, yes, but also chaos.
Drug addiction and recovery, homelessness, and mental illness are very much out in the open here. There are so many different genres of therapy and psychiatric and social services around, some I’d never heard of before.
Just about every day I get asked for money from people who are struggling. For all Noho’s apparent inclusivity, I’ve still witnessed blatant transphobia and overheard racial slurs shouted from the street. Out my living room window, I’ve watched multiple arrests. But I’ve also seen parades, countless protests, giant puppets, and once, a horse.
When I lived in downtown Ipswich, the most exciting thing I ever saw out my window was maybe some chickens that got too loose by the library.
Living in Ipswich, in many ways, soothed and affirmed my Thoreauvian self-reliant spirit. In a historic cash-only town where things rarely change, I could shape my sense of Self within the stable environment, figuring out who I was by where I fit in and didn’t. That’s just not how it is in Northampton, where things feel in flux all of the time.
Northampton wears its heart on its sleeve unlike anywhere else I’ve lived before. It’s been both empowering and painful to witness, and difficult to integrate.
And this is just considering what’s going on outside my window, not even what’s happening in my own life. My gender and sexuality have become more amorphous, my relationships more unconventional and harder to explain. I’m awakening to and reckoning with my neurodivergence. I’ve also been questioning my place as a writer and artist.
With so many people out here teaching, learning, creating, trying, failing, hurting, and helping, who even am I? How do I matter?
I came here expecting to rebuild a sense of Self and purpose. Instead I now find myself wondering what even is the purpose of “Self?”
This city rubs against all my individualist instincts. I can’t just simply squirrel away to contemplate it all and emerge, ready to engage just how I want. Or rather, I could do that, but Northampton asks more of me. It demands a different approach, one that doesn’t center Self as an individual, but a Self as in relation to others.
So, it’s no wonder I felt so “soupy” returning back here from Ipswich last week. There are so many ways to plug into Northampton, so many ways I’m already plugged in, that it can feel so daunting. Yet it’s also very exciting.
I’ve seen so much art and live music and performance this year. I’ve been taking classes in random things that interest me, from linocut printmaking to rope bondage. I’ve discovered unexpected joy and healing in dance. I’ve met many great people, but kept most of them at an arm's length for fear of overcommitting and becoming more overwhelmed than I already am.
Going into my second year in Northampton, my goal is to find a way to hold the city a little bit closer. What exactly that’ll look like, I’m not sure, but it’ll involve learning how to exist in that sweet spot of discomfort, where I’m challenged to grow, but not pushed so far that I get lost in the chaos.
I trust that I can find a balance, because I already know that I am no one thing. I can be independent and resilient while also connected and vulnerable. I can be orderly in some aspects, fluid in others. I’m constantly changing, just like Northampton. I, too, am creative, queer, and I’ve got a lot to share.
