A Year of Confronting the Gentrification of Self

How to stay yourself when everything around you changes

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I have an announcement that I’m excited to share with you: Starting in the new year, I will be joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. Fret not, dear readers; Brooklyn, Everywhere shall live on. My pieces for the web and magazine will be sent to you directly and, albeit not quite as frequently, you will still receive exclusive missives about the topics close to my heart.

Having this space to share with you—and getting your notes and emails and even poems—has been extraordinarily grounding for me, at a time that I have really needed it. This has been a wild year.

As a kid, science was never really my thing, with the exception of geology. I loved how rocks could tell the story of a living Earth, one subject to constant change. Like in our own lives, most change in the Earth happens slowly. But every once in a while, a sudden event can happen—like a volcano erupting or a meteor hitting the Earth—that creates abrupt and irrevocable change; later, when you chart the Earth’s story, you can mark the event as a turning point with a definitive “before” and “after.” For me, 2022 was a volcanic year, one that saw 44 years of slowly layered sedimentary rock quickly and suddenly covered over with smooth, shiny quartz.

Or, to put it in the terms of this newsletter’s main preoccupations: I’ve been thinking a lot about the gentrification of the self, in a deeply personal way. My new staff-writer position at The Atlantic is the latest in a string of pretty fancy titles and experiences that I’ve accrued in 2022, which have utterly transformed the contours of my daily life. It’s rare for me to be home for two consecutive weeks, these days, without needing to travel somewhere. “Doing podcasts” is a routine occurrence now; I even made it on to the New York Approval Matrix. People have gotten nail art in homage to my book cover and, well, I was literally honored at a parade.

I mean, whose life is this? Three years ago I was making a living by doing fundraising for a public college! And yet, while I’m very grateful and proud of the work I’ve done that’s earned the attention, I also find myself wary of buying into any of it too much. Because of, well … Brooklyn.

First of all, around here, there’s nobody worse than someone who “thinks who she is.” But secondly, if I were to really put my finger on what irritates me about the gentrification of my hometown, it is the implication that somehow this place was not merely “discovered” by all of its recent well-to-do transplants, but “saved” by them too. That before everyone moved here and made it “fancy,” it was a piece of shit. (I don’t know why the cabs wouldn’t come to my borough, but I assure you it is not because it was a piece of shit.)

I’m a professional artist now. I get to spin out words for a living—across all sorts of media—and travel and talk to people about the words I’ve spun. That, like the abundance of gourmet coffee shops near me now, is amazing. But the truth is, my life before was really nice too—just in a totally different way.

More importantly, without having lived that other life, I couldn’t possibly have the insights and worldview that enable me to do this job now. At least, not in this way. My unusual path toward this career has been my strength, I think.

I opened my debut novel with a riff on fancy napkins that I thought of precisely because, on many a weekend in my past professional life, I had spent torturous hours folding, tucking, and pleating them, just to see my work undone with the flick of a wrist. I know what it's like to be stiffed on money by massively wealthy people when you desperately need it. I watched my grandparents—with a single GED between them—have a dignified retirement because of benefits fought for by their labor unions. I, meanwhile, went years without health care and went to work sick because if you didn’t show, you didn’t get paid.

I recognize that these circumstances are now largely in my rearview mirror. The truth is, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to stay myself, even as I move further away from the experiences that shaped me as a person. Even as my professional commitments allow me less time at home, and less time with friends—the places and people who remind me not to “think who I am.”

I’ve watched Old Brooklyn slip from my grasp and morph into something altogether different, one utterly confident that it’s better. I’m cautious not to let the same thing happen to me. Brooklyn is the bedrock, of course. Spreading love, community, neighbors, loyalty, culture, and joyful noise—this is the foundation that all the 44 years of sedimentary rock were set upon before this one volcanic year.

Years ago, I read a quote in an article that stayed with me. I’m frustrated I couldn’t find it again to properly attribute the author, but it said something along the lines of: “How can you use your power and privilege to dismantle power and privilege?” Perhaps that, for me, is the answer—if not to dismantle power and privilege, at the very least to call them into question. And I can think of no more marvelous place to do that than here, at The Atlantic, with readers like you.

Thank you for being here with me throughout this year. I promise to keep it Brooklyn with you here, always.

Happy holidays, feliz Navidad y Año Nuevo!

Xochitl